First things first..

Probably the most important area of MLS is the forums. It's what draws people in. It's the majority of the content on the site. As such, it's the area that makes the most money. The forum sponsorships and the other advertising that is there pay the majority of the bills. I need to be careful to make the transition on the forums as painless as possible. I need to keep as much of the functionality of the Snitz forums as I can while providing new and improved features.

There are several different forum options for DotNetNuke. I looked at all of them. Like I mentioned in one of my past posts, I had wanted to use the ASP.NET forums. Unfortunately, they never completed their DNN integration and decided to privatize the whole system. I was a little disappointed. YAF (Yet Another Forum) .NET has a DNN module, but it didn't seem to integrate into the rest of DNN very well. The DNN core forums are still very young and don't have a lot of features. All the other solutions at the time I was investigating them were open source or free. (The ASP.NET forums, now known as Community Server are no longer free. In fact, they carry a pretty steep price tag for a community site like mine.)

That brings us to Active Forums from Active Modules. I was impressed with these forums from the get go. All the features I wanted were there. Even some that I didn't even know I wanted were in there. One big feature they advertise is a converter from Snitz to AF and DNN. That there alone was worth the cost if it works. The biggest draw back for me was the cost. In the past, I have been really hesitant to spend a lot of cash on software for the site. The other drawback for me was that all of the websites that I could find that ran Active Forums had very little traffic. Usually there's only a post or two per day. MLS generally receives over 200 to 300 posts per day. In addition, there are usually at least 75 to 100 users on the site at a given time. Mariette Knap of Smallbizserver.net calmed those fears. Smallbizserver.net is run entirely on DotNetNuke and Active Forums. There's a lot of traffic there and the forums are very busy.

After much debate, I decided that I would fork out the cash and purchase Active Forums. I dropped the money on the Enterprise license. I have it installed on my dev server and have been experimenting with it. I downloaded the conversion module, but it doesn't seem to work. I've submitted a support ticket on it and was told that they were in the middle of an upgrade to AF and would look at the conversion script after that was done. They released the new AF version yesterday, so hopefully the conversion script is not far behind.