I recently finished up a complete overhaul of the G35NYC – a NYC based Infiniti G35/G37 enthusiasts community. When I first took on the project the community was ran off a fairly out-dated vBulletin install – which unfortunately had been compromised – making daily use of the forums fairly annoying. The decision was made to start off with a fresh install of the latest stable vBulletin (v4.x) – and migrate all of the existing posts, members and threads over to this new install.
Following the new install we had to do a full redesign of the forums – which is only partially complete right now. Any designs created for v3.x of vBulletin are not compatible with V4.x – so rather than converting the old design we decided to go ahead and create a brand new one. The color scheme is done, the top header has been redesigned – and in the next few weeks a few more graphics will be changed.
Moving on to the actual functionality of the forums – the original forums were full of spam – making a moderators job extremely difficult. Akismet was never integrated with the site – and as such there was alot of spam-related registrations, posts and threads. To help combat this I integrated Akismet into the forums, and also setup a Captcha system for new replies. In the future newly registered members will be the only ones required to utilize a Captcha for new posts/replies until they surpass a certain amount of posts.
For a full screenshot of the site head on over to our Portfolio, or visit http://g35nyc.com.