Hi all, I just got vBulletin and am starting my first community site with a forum! What are the recommended mods that you use?

Welcome headers is my favorite, try it. It will make more people register, post, etc. There's a lot you can do with it.

Originally Posted by Hobbit

Welcome headers is my favorite, try it. It will make more people register, post, etc. There's a lot you can do with it.

This is one I was going to recommend. I also like "users online in the past day/24 hours"

What do you recommend for SEO?

vbSEO is the best seo product but it costs $150.

Anyone use vRewrite? I just installed that to avoid the 150 cost.

I also added the "no registered" info bar like Lee has on sprintusers.com

I like to keep mods to a minimum on a forum, especially anything that adds alot of queries, or modifies the database in any way.

I used the welcome headers for quite a while, but decided to just set something simple up with a conditional for guests myself.

Users Online in the last 24 hours is a good mod for a new forum, seems to make the forum look a little busier. Begins to look bad though on busy forums as it tends to clutter things up.

I love vBSEO, install it on all my vbulletin fourms. Also recommend their sitemap to submit daily to google and yahoo (free mod)

The main thing is to make sure you really need the mod, and that you feel it will benefit the communty before installing it. I see alot of forums that are overloaded with mods that most on the forum don't care about.

Some of my other favorites

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=130868
(embed youtube and google videos)

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=170
IbpProArcade

vbmodder.com has a nice AJAX Cron mod as well.

my favorites at the moment:

- welcome headers
- custom profile options (i.e. whats your fav etc)
- youtube embed
- vbseo - is a must imo for seo purposes
- gallery of some sort

I have a few others but these are a must to help promote interactivity.

john- I sent you a pm

I have a lot of small hacks such as Display Unread Posts and things like that. Just things to make it easier for members to find new posts to respond to. Big products I use VBSEO, vBpicgallery, and Photopost.