238 seconds in my mind.... Social networking, boonex, and facebook...

I applied the dolphin script to one of my domains.
Something that is often overlooked and probably the biggest reason for failure to carry thru with this script is that many people do not understand they need to verify and apply a license code for all the additional features / plugins /hooks that come with the dolphin script.

Failure to apply these codes will in fact make your forums, video, uploads, music etc fail to function properly, if they function at all.

In the last 4 years that i have been messing around with boonex scripts, i have found more and more that they are actually becoming much more "new user" friendly. No longer hush hush on the proper install methods and etc. this may very well be due to the fear of falling out of the loop??? perhaps.. but none the less they have improved immensly on installation prodcutivity and limited the isntall conflicts & trouble shooting a great deal.

as for VB and IPB, I do not think either are worthy of being considered a fully developed "Social Networking" script. they are based off forums boards, and although forums boards may have been the stepping stone to a "social networking" method. they are still born and raised as just that. FORUMS BOARDS.

However, both script dev teams are obviously in the works to progressing out from the simple forums stage, and I am very much interested in watching them gain momentum. Mostly for the fact of what they will offer the end user, as well as the pressure that will be placed upon those dev teams trying to follow suit (ie: smf,phpbb, etc etc.) that push to progress and keep up, will also allow those with the smarts to do so a chance to start up a great board.

lets all agree on one thing. as it stands, FB has the floor when it comes to current "Social networking scripts" I would never in my life want to be the guy that has to maintain that system or do the updates. I can not even begin to try and fathom the effort that has gone into compiling all of that which has become facebook. And one thing is for sure... no matter what you do today, or over the next 6 months, you will not top the facebook rash that has spread.

I know i have taken this sorta off topic to a point, but this thread is regards to social networks, so I will speak my peace

facebook has done what i am sure atleast 75% of the administration here has wanted to do with their site. if not for the lack of funding and knowledge in PHP codeing, i would have had a facebook started .. ohhhh i dunno.. about 4 yrs ago. however I did not have the finances to obtain such goals. so.. here I am twiddling my thumbs. as most probably are, wondering how to turn my "not-so-thousands-of-man-time-and-dollars- scripts" into something decent, without becoming a wanna-be FB. And the task at hand.. is not simple.

All the pipe Facebook has been laying, leaves me to wonder what effect teh stalemate will have on the average user. when the ADHD wears off and the addicted become not so addicted.. what will be then? Will forums and portals bridged with a cms, become useful again?

I suppose time will tell... ...

What I hate about dolphin is they keep everything locked down and you got to pay to get anything good or do it yourself. I would say it's very user friendly but annoying because everywhere is something Dolphin related. I prefer myspace to facebook. Faceboook never really interested me.

the time invested by the dev team has gotta be worth somethin man. They're not about to just give away years of code.

I've played with Dolphin in the past (last time was a couple of months ago) and I agree it is a really complicated process to get it up and running. I never really got to the point where I needed to upgrade it..but if it is anything like getting it installed I'd rather not try it.

Honestly after toying around with it I felt I would be better off hacking vBulletin to death to bring it up to par feature wise (on the S/N front).

As for Social Networking itself I think we'll see it spread all over the 'net as scripts that replicate the functions of facebook and myspace become more common and mainstream. My guess is 5 years from now you'll visit multiple social networks each dealing with it's own subject....in other words they'll be just like the forums of today (in fact many popular sites will have probably added s/n functions on top of their existing systems).

Social Networking isn't going away anytime soon but that doesn't mean people should get all paranoid and start to fear it.

One of the biggest problems with Dolphin is that while they have a lot of features, most are not very complete. For instance, they have a forum, but it doesn't even have a count for topic views. They have profile comments, but it doesn't give the user an option to receive e-mail notice that a new comment has been added. Etc, etc.
I'm in the process of writing a big review for Dolphin 6 on my blog so I've gotten to know the system well.

Scam!!!

Why boonex is a scam?
Boonex problem nr1. No coding standard

Boonex is writen by several people using different technologies. Its main base (Dolphin) is writen in pure php with its own template engine and forum (Orca) uses xlst. That has large negative impact to integration of forum in site and site in forum. When coding, please use single technology and template system.

Whats even worser, different parts of dolphins code itself is writen by completely different people, and very in the hurry. So everyone has its own imagination how to interact with different parts of the code. It is very tricky to modify code that way to suit site needs.

Boonex problem nr2. Template engine and separation of code/design/database

This problem in dolphin/boonex needs a point on its own. Boonex uses custom template system ( that should be called layout system). The blocks of generated html code are pased to specific places in the template. That creates a big headache for programers as they need to search through code for the place where some box is generated. It might be generated in template, or in specific function in one of numerous includes. And so on. Even pligg has better templating than this.

It is very tricky to rip boonex templating apart, as whole coding is based on such poor programming practice. They would be better off using existing template system like smarty or similar one.

This leads to problem nr3

Boonex problem nr3. Crapy use of Database

We saw serveral other competing sites launched on boonex, but we did not care much. Why? Becouse when they reach 500-1000 daily visitors they will break apart. The reason for it is very bad programming and use of database.

For example, boonex uses profile builder which assigns fields to profiles. So the output of profile uses more than one table and is quite inefficient.

Also, there is a nice 20-30 query overhead on each page display to fetch all the configuration values from table. Silly, isn’t it ? They would be FAR better of using a file for configuring sofware or caching it in php file like it is done in most of the systems.

Another simple problem. When boonex wants to display a profile being online it additionally check database for its status. But that data was pulled from database already. So 20 useless queries again.

Resume

I would not suggest using boonex if you want to keep your programmers sane. We have have changed the code almost completely for now, and you will need to do that too. Boonex is a scam.

So you brought up an over 2 year old thread to state its a scam? hmm, guess I should be pissed because I own 2 licenses for it?

Mmm k.

Ahhh but I put a great 20 to 30 minutes into the initial post. lol.

So... has anyone's opinions or thoughts on Boonex changed in the past couple years?

CMOBOSS said:

Ahhh but I put a great 20 to 30 minutes into the initial post. lol.

So... has anyone's opinions or thoughts on Boonex changed in the past couple years?

Click to expand...

It's strange that little has been written about Dolphin since it looks so big and good. We've just started testing it http://dolphin.ifolkmun.se.
Our plan is to migrate our news sites from Wordpress to Dolphin. I stress tested it yesterday whit a very good graph (up to 50 concurrent users): http://loadimpact.com/result/dolphin...6206e5df102425

They have a funny system whit the goal to lure users into the 1 000 dollar premium membership, but it's free out of the box.

There's also an expensive market for plugins (30 USD and up) which could stop people.

I'm really getting hesitant since the information is so scarce, but I believe the google hits on "Boonex Scam" etc is from five years back.

This is a post about Dolphin 7 and the new strategy for Boonex: http://www.modmysite.com/boonex-dolphin-7/9920-dolphin-7-new-features.html

Any feedback on this Social CMS is welcome. Please also sign up on our test site if you wish: http://dolphin.ifolkmun.se

I had always hoped that they would sort out their UI and usability issues out. When I first found them years ago, they were something amazing you didn't know anyone could do... They sprouted up around the same time Ajax was conceived.
I dunno if they could twist my arm into switching from WP/buddypress, sounds like they are still just as complicated and in the end to really get the stuff working and looking good, you need to spend a pile of money.