Replace PHPBB Forum Engine with Vanilla Forums

[diffy]

I guess this is on the fringe of what could be called a feature request

I am a community maintainer on a couple of small non-public projects. I have recently been amazed at how much more efficient our community-forum works, in particular as a support and feature request forum, when using Vanilla Forums.

The forum is laid in a similar fashion to the StackOverflow website, where posts can be voted up, for visibility and it gives a very good overview for the users and the maintainers.

Vanilla Forums is free, as in GPL v2.

I used to use PHPBB back between 2004-2007, then we switched to what I percieved was the most advanced free forum, Simple Machines. I stayed with SMF for 5 long years, until I decided to drop it, since it is practically not in effective development any longer. As far as I can see, the most advanced and most inviting forum engine at the very moment is Vanilla Forums.

Check out other projects who are using it:
Vanillaforums' own forum: http://vanillaforums.org/discussions
Slicehost - http://forums.gamesalad.com/
Sourcefabric - maintains 4 free software on the same forum http://forum.sourcefabric.org/
Ajaxplorer - see how they are using it for feature requests and user support.
http://ajaxplorer.info/community/forum/

The benefit would be a better interface and easier community interaction for the devs of Subsonic as well as a thrill for the users.

[diffy]

BUMP!

I still believe this would be a huge benefit due to the following reasons:

Question system:
A concise way to ask questions, and a concise way mark questions answerred. Good for the
supporting party and good for the asking user.

Voting system:
Provides a native voting system, where threads can be upvoted Stackexchange/Quora/Reddit style which could be very useful
in feature requests

Better overview:
Vanillaforums is a fresh touch on forums and I believe it provides the clearest overview of the forum structure.

More effective community leverage:
Let's people interact even better than a regular forum
People can have transparent open conversations between each others - for everyone to see (or limited to conversationists)
Let's people have walls and activity status updates like Twitter

Keeping the old data is not a problem:
The old data is easily converted to VanillaForums using their Converter.
I have personally used it from PHPBB2 and PHPBB3 and it works perfectly, converting all data and structure into
the fresh Vanilla Install. Users and passwords included.

More awesome features:
Facebook and Twitter Single Sign On (SSO)
Facebook like and Facebook share
Twitter feeds
Share to Twitter

Great license:
GPLv2 with code on Github

Tailoring:
Embeddable and very flexible
php/mysql

http://www.vanillaforums.org

Disclosure:
I am not affiliated with Subsonic or Vanillaforums.
I am a regular user of both software projects and just want the best for Subsonic and its community.