Test installs

I suggested this at a webmaster's forum that I admin at but it fell on deaf ears, I suppose because it's a lot of work.

What would you guys think about setting up test installs of various forum software, perhaps on a sub-domain, and then letting your members play around with it and demo the admin providing they have X number of posts.

Unless the paid forum's ELUA (vB & IB) precludes something like this, I don't believe vB's does not sure about IB I think it would be a good asset to any webmaster type community especially one based on based around forums/communities.

To be sure it would be some work on the part of whom ever runs it, upgrading people to admin, keeping up with patches, etc but I betcha it will pay off in more discussion on AA.

Plus rather selfishly, I'd like to have a place where I can test out template edits or even look up where a specific setting is without mucking around in a production site.

Just a thought,
Dan

 

I'm a bit apprehensive in doing so.

 

Actually Dan, I have thought about this - rather recently, so it's very coincidental that you bring this up.

Another administrator forum has just this. It's a nice custom script that gives a bit of information about each script and then allows you to test it out.

I'll be sure to talk it over with the rest of the team.

Thanks again for the suggestion.

 

vBulletins' license prohibits a live test forum. It must be closed via htacess I believe.
You'll need to read it to be sure.

 

If that's the case, then we'd need to purchase a license and just use it as a test forum, resetting it every day or so.

 

If you want it open for others to use, then yeah.

 

Unless they make some sort of deal, but I highly doubt that.

 

lol,. you'd be right, I'm guessing. I could be wrong tho, so be sure to look in the manual or at the license.

 

I think the only real way of doing this would be to indeed purchase an additional license - I'm not entirely sure of the implications that come along with the license agreement, but as mentioned above, I'm quite sure that this is the only legal way possible.

 

I like the idea myself - it's something we originally wanted here.

 

If you do this with vBulletin, I strongly suggest that you put it into Demo Mode when you do so. Potentially giving access to Plugins and Products can wreak havoc on the entire server once they write code to get into the database or run exec().

You can check out this to see how: Variable vBulletin constants - vBCodex

And yeah, a demo site for vBulletin would require its own license.

 

So, I'm not the only one with crazy ideas. That's nice to know.

It should be pretty simple to automate the resetting. I'm not that good with php but I imagine setting up the forum and populating it with some test users/threads/post, then backing up that database and writing a script to drop the live tables and repopulate from the backup wouldn't be too hard. You'd probably be better off waiting until yous get better hosting though.

 

Well we have the hosting, we're just limited in the ability to move to the new server.

 

I'm quite fond of this idea - it could be put into action shortly after transferring over to the new dedicated server.

 

Think this is an great idea even if I am not going to use the vB demo but maybe the other ones