You know what's right about ActiveForums? It's far better than the DNN built in forum IMO. It has much more options. It integrates with it's sister product ActiveSocial and it performs extremely well.
I could on at length about all the good things it can do. But enough people before me and after me can tell you that story.
I have a different and true story I want to tell. Let me tell you what's WRONG with ActiveForums.
In a two words:
Will Morgenwreck
Will Morgenwreck is the developer of the ActiveForum software. He is also "well respected" in the DNN community. Or so I've heard and that means many of you will stand up to defend him. I get it. But please just read what I have to say first.
In my opinion, he is slowly choking the product with features that are useful to him but not to the majority of people who need a FORUM software.
To say that ActiveForums is a high-end forum is probably technically correct, but it's really a baby in terms of features compared to more established forum software (albeit non DNN). Things like auto URL detection are fairly recent in AF even though they have been in other forum software going on a decade or more.
And why? Because until Will Morgenwreck decides it's important for him, he generally has little interest in making it.
For example, in most forum software when you reply to a post that is, say 3 pages deep. You are taken back to the page you responded from. So if you replied on Page 3, you would be returned to page 3.
In ActiveForums (as of this writing) you go back to page 1. The TOP of page 1. So now if you want to continue your reading, you have to navigate back to where you were. And if you decide to engage in another reply in that thread, you get to repeat the process. Most users will stop participating after doing this a few times. It just aint worth it.
Of course I reported this to him in October while the bug was in the beta version. It used to work as expected pre-beta.
When the beta became a release, it wasn't fixed. Well see most of his threads aren't more than 1 page long. truth is his forums have probably a core active userbase of 10 or less regulars if that. So of course the problem is not one he is keen to fix. It doesn't affect him. He doesn't care and it makes his job easier because not a lot of people are affected by it. Maybe most of his users don't have enough traffic to garner multi-page posts. One user who did report it, was ignored (as of this writing).
Another example... When I first bought ActiveSocial and AF, there was a nasty bug that would cause an Int16 overflow. I believe this was because he had no opportunity to try it on a site with over 32,767 users (the max value for an Int16). I had well over 100,000 users. This meant that a majority of my users could not even use the features in ActiveSocial. It took him several months to come around and post a fix. I don't know about you guys, but I think thats a serious flaw that should demand an IMMEDIATE fix.
But again, it did not affect his life or his own personal usage of the product. So why should he hurry? Over 70,000 users could not use the product on my site and then I had to field hundreds of support tickets to explain it as a bug for several months. But hey, no skin off his nose. He got my money already.
If I try to bring up topics and engage him in conversation in email, he tells me to take it the forums on his site. If I do that on the forums, he sets my access to "moderated" so none of my posts appear without his eyes looking at it first AND he has even removed my posts that were non inflammatory but perhaps made him look bad because of my reasoning in any debates at hand.
For all the good things that ActiveForums brings to the table, the dark spot is the developer himself. Unfortunately I am tied into AF because I chose to build my site around it.
The truth is I want AF to be kick ass as much as anyone. I just disagree with the way Will handles things and feel like he is not open to any criticism or suggestions. And I get frustrated. I can't open a free dialog with him via email. I can't open a free dialog via his web site and I am running out of ideas to get through to him.
So here it is in a nutshell. If you need more than the basic forum software from DNN, then ActiveForums is probably a good thing for you provided you don't expect to be treated like a worthwhile customer and accept that Will knows what you want and need better than you do.
Flame on...