Ok I hear what you guys are saying and it does have merit. Truth is so far it's what we've found to be one of the easier alternatives to maintain and setup that will look good. Here is the deal with the site software so that you guys can see if from a full perspective.

Time Limitations: We as admins have a limited amount of time that we can put towards slaving on page tweaks and changes. On top of that the more time we are scrounging and playing catchup looking for bugs we are spending less time organizing competitions, advertising for PGD and other cool events that help make this place fun. Also taking from past experience trying to merge free CMS and forums software to get what we want takes a whole lot more time than something that comes with everything we want.

Reliability: We want the most reliable solution. Merging 2+ pieces of software doesn't come with the promise of working 100% without a lot of work put into them, which as stated above we don't have. If it was designed and tested as working together then it's fair to assume that it should be properly functional with all the features under the hood. The current CMS was the free alternative, but frankly it doesn't work well at all and has some serious bugs that prevent us from being able to do what we need to make this place better.

Our Needs, Out of the Box: So far nothing thats free has ALL of PGD's needs out of the box. We need forums, news posts(by members and staff with staff publishing them), private messaging, member profiles and the ability to easily and quickly write and approve articles. We need it all to work together and be fun to use. Bugs aren't fun and lots of different free stuff with lots of bugs does not a PGD make. And this is the PGD of the past so we clearly want to avoid this from the very next step.


In conclusion to all of this, yes I see that you guys think that vBulletin is a big stompy monster, but it does everything we need. Now I've only used it for a short time, but it doesn't appear to be latent with bugs like SMF and phpBB, but we do have to look into this for ourselves and make sure it will perform properly as we need it. As far as the out of the box, it's the only one that fits our criteria that we know of. However, if you good folks have an alternative that isn't going to be just mash free X with free Y, which is a road we've been down for years now, then we will be willing to check it out.

We do listen and we do care what you guys think, but we also have to do all the work and we just aren't willing to settle for any more mad scientist projects much anymore, we've been there and done that and to be fair, it just isn't working all that well for us or for you guys really.