Do You Have a Portal on Your Forum?

On your forum, do you have a portal, or something similar? Why or why not? And what do you use it for?

I have a portal on my forum. I have one because it's a nifty utility and it provides basic statistics, which is what I use it for.

 

I'm not a fan of portals, but if they are done the right way, then they can be a huge benefit to the community

 

I will be adding a homepage to the new Advertising Mania well in all truth over time I will be making it a website with a forum.

 

I don't enjoy portals on forums and I find them very annoying as its just a distraction stopping me from going straight to the forum which is what I do.

 

I just talked about this over the weekend on the XenForo forums because it was recommended for my site. Ultimately, I've decided (at least for now) not to use a portal for exactly the reason you mentioned, Kaiser: that a lot of people will skip right past it to get to the forum. I have enough stuff on my forum's homepage anyway that adding a portal wouldn't be of much benefit anyway (since I also wouldn't see myself removing the stuff currently on the forum index off of it).

 

Anyone use a CMS, portal or a framework like IP.Content for their site? I use IP.Content and i'm constantly trying to improve my main site with it. What about you?

 

Here's my rather lame IP.Content implementation. I used to use it for articles but I didn't update it very much so I figured "screw it" and just dumped all the articles into their respective forum boards as topics.

I find portals that just republish forum topics kinda pointless. Why do people need two places to see the same content? I like my simple list of recent topics.

 

I've used portals in the past to showcase important threads and stuff and I've used plugins for page/media management too. I've never experienced IP.Content itself, so I have no idea what else it actually does.

 

Never really saw the importance in portals as I mentioned above they are just a distraction to me stopping me from going straight to the forum.

 

No, I prefer hand-coding a homepage instead.

 

Why, what wrong with using a portal as an add-on or using premade scripts?

 

Hmm, I would like to have a portal on my forum... But I think I might have trouble installing it... I run phpBB

 

If you dont need one, and are doing fine without one, then there is no need.

 

But I heard Portals were good to have if your forum was based on news & updates and that type of stuff, that would be nice have as a good home page, Ive been looking for a type of homepage like that for phpBB

 

It depends really on how you put it to use, but people usually just go straight to the forum.

 

Nope, I don't have a "portal" per se. I have a main site that's a blog and news site and the forums are pretty much just a supplement for the community, but no portal as I don't see a real need for one.

 

I run two forums which use portals (vBAdvanced). In my opinion, they're both very good and lend a real handy overview of news. For a site that is based on delivering news a portal can be very useful. I understand what you're saying about displaying the same content twice, but it is displayed differently. On the forum each piece is in it's own thread. On the portal you can view all recent news without clicking back and forth to a forum/sub-forum index.

Horses for courses, but I like them:

Here they are:

http://www.alienscolonialmarines.net
http://www.dead-island.com

 

I personally dislike portals on my forum a lot.

I think they're distracting and confusing to say the least.

I would prefer to use something like wordpress if it was essential for me to have a front page. Though I've never personally required a front page like that I think people who stumble across my forum know what it's about right away.

 

I agree, I would rather use Wordpress over a portal as a homepage because it's a much better solution. I never liked portals.

 

I am not particularly a fan of portals. Chatting Time doesn't have one, nor do I see a need for one at this time. There's enough to do on the forum as it is, and really it's just a waste of time more than anything. Even if a portal on another person's site looks nice, I prefer to cut to the chase and go straight to posting right away. Not goof off with any portal or anything like that.