Alternative Forum

Is there any alternative to useing Orca forums,

There are third-party integrations for phpBB and vBulletin, but these are very pricey. Unless you would prefer any of these two, and have the money, your options are very limited.

Thats what i thought tbh.

Shame really as forum really lets site down.

I suppose if your membership is overly-excited by fancy Ajax tricks, they will like Orca just fine. Also, just fighting against the system to post a new topic will be like a test of endurance for them. You could make it into a game, really.

phpBB

http://www.expertzzz.com/Downloadz/view/6977

Just my two cents:

Orca is the perfect system for the Dolphin Community Script.  The reason I say this is Dolphin already has all the features you need surrounding the forum.  phpBB and vBulletin are designed to be standalone forum systems.  Therefore, they have many features that when installed into Dolphin, makes them a bit overwhelming in the Dolphin environment.  I have installed them before into Dolphin and as a standalone forum.  From personal experience, when you install them into Dolphin, it just becomes too much.  By themselves however, they are great!  If you were to install Orca by itself, then I would say it is not enough to stand by itself. It depends on Dolphin for all the extra functionalities.  Consider that before you decide to spend the money into something you may not be happy with.  That is just my opinion and you know what opinions are like :D

I believe you have some change coming:)  It's pretty easy to dumb down a real forum, but it's impossible to smarten up Orca.   Anybody that is accustomed to communicating via forum posts, is used to the functionality of VB or IPB... like thread & forum subscriptions, sub forums, private forums, etc.  On the admin side... the admin tools sure come in handy... which are all but nonexistent in Orca.

Orca is fine and works for the most part....   As a simple forum its good the only complaint I have is if you have a private forum others can see that its there and then see whats posted in it if they look at the recent forum post....

*Jumps ahead* Until Orca gets sub-directories and pages for longer topics, it's dead in the water (ha, I made a funny). Oh, and maybe, also when it doesn't crash into oblivion just by posting some Javascript.

I don't think there is anyone here who "loves" Orca - it is mediocre at best, but this decision is a trade off.   If you install some other BB you will likely be constantly fighting to keep up to date with the different versions.  Dolphin will come out with a new version, and then your BB will have problems, the BB will come out with a new version, and then Dolphin will have problems.  I've said this before, but I wish Boonex would have just dumped Orca with D7 and concentrated on integrating with the major BBs.  That way they would have been able to concentrate on their strengths in social networking, while having all the features of the other products.  For my sites, I am thinking about deemphasizing forums and concentrating on blogs, as they are more "self managed" and take less moderation.

I launched a forum powered by Orca stand-alone awhile back. It was called The Worst Forum and focused on all of the script's faults. You'd be surprised with what kind of hell people went through when using it. Perhaps it's time for a relaunch.

Does anyone have a better option than the phpBB module?  I'd like a forum that feels as if it's part of the site.  I looked at the phpBB demo, and it's a forum inside an iFrame from what I see.

If I"m wrong, or there's a way to modify it so it doesn't show the forum's 'login, logout, and other header info', please let me know.

There are no good third party forum integrations available, and it doesn't look like there ever will be.  I gave up on the idea.  After the most recent changes to Orca Forum, I found it tolerable.  Allowing HTML in posts, and the use of HTMLPurifier, is a huge plus over all that BBCode flying around.  Whoever invented BBCode should be tar and feathered.

I think there may be forums available that get away from BBCode... those might be worth integrating.  I think you'll see more improvement to Orca before you see a really good third party forum integration.