Quote Originally Posted by Nao
Same here. I've been offering blogs for users (with admin panel and stuff) at http://noisen.com for the last 3 years. It's using custom code, but I'm working on a mod for doing that, and there are already plenty of blog mods for SMF.

I'm sorry, it's just that I don't understand your reason for moving to another forum software, paid-for at that, instead of trying out SMF2, which is stable enough in my opinion. (I've been using it ever since I opened noisen.com)
I could understand a move to IPB, which is relatively nice, or the free PunBB, which is faster on slow servers (and yours looks like it's a very slow server, or at least a slow connection to France).

Interestingly, I spent some time at SMF developing the software (so I have knowledge in both SMF and Pascal game development), and I can tell you that SMF is to forum software what Delphi is to programming, whereas vBulletin would, fittingly, be Visual Basic (it started out as a forum for VB devs), IPB would be C++ and phpBB would be Fortran.
I'm now working on a side-project that should hopefully get SMF up to speed in terms of feature set (compared to the commercial competition) on the day SMF2 gets out. Consider it a super-mod that implements everything that should be in a modern forum system -- for free.

Just my two cents. Don't switch until you've at least tried SMF2 RC3 (or the upcoming final RC.)
The thing is, as we've said time and time again.... we (the admins) are all pretty busy and building a site with all that functionality requires us to install numerous mods. This raises issues relating to setup time and maintenance. All too often when you're using mods, you have to wait on upgrading the core site software until all the mods are compatible. This is a problem. It also takes a lot longer than just updating one all encompassing suite of software like vBulletin.

We want to simplify site maintenance so we can spend more time doing interesting things for the site, like writing articles etc.