Unfortunately, the Truth about Free software is…
They are really NOT free at all!

• People neglect the fact that it usually takes a great amount of time and knowledge to set up and run free software on their servers because of poor documentation and poorly designed setup process that usually are part of the "free" experience!
• People neglect the fact that designing online software takes a lot of energy, expertise, and artistry, and it is almost a guarantee that free software never receives the attentions that are required for quality assurance, and therefore are usually bug-ridden and full of security holes!
• People neglect the fact that supporting online software takes a lot of time and dedication as well, and the fact that the authors did not get anything in return guarantees there will be little to none customer support when You need it the most!

And, premium software really are just TOO expensive…
Be Aware of the Shortcomings they bring along!

• People neglect the fact that extensive advertising online can get expensive too, and if You pay a lot for any piece of software it usually means You are paying for their advertising!
• Many people believe that if a BIG NAME company is using certain piece of software, then that software must be good for them as well so it is justifiable to pay a lot!
  
  People neglect the fact that the nature of their sites / businesses in most cases are very different from the BIG NAME companies, so they end up wasting a lot of money just to mimic those BIG NAME’s.

Don’t be the Last to find out…
The more features a software has, the WORSE it could be for You!

“Loaded with features” is a common trait shared by free software and overly expensive software. They lead You to believe the more features they have, the better the software will serve you. This concept is by itself not a problem, however..

• In the case of free software, features are usually thrown in for the sake of being comprehensive WITHOUT a careful design process. Poorly designed features can only lead to a host of problems for You when they are being used by your members. Did I mention endless BUGS and SECURITY HOLES and NO SUPPORT?
• In the case of expensive software, they want You to justify for the cost so they just try their best to include all the bells and whistles they can find into the software, without seriously considering the consequences of software being a RESOURCE HOG to Your site.

People forget the fact that online community software are software that could potentially be used concurrently by thousands of users on a server with limited resources.

And thus, Performance & Stability should be the TOP FOCUSES for software designed for online uses!

Sadly, both aspects never receive the attention they deserve during the product development cycle. You just don’t see this practice nowadays because software authors are conditioned to only look to expand the Features List, instead of the Benefits List for their software.

A Feature only becomes a Benefit when it works and performs perfectly!

It is just so hard to find a software that was not only carefully designed and tested, but also fully and vigorously supported!

It does sound a little disappointing, and knowing that there are software out there charging thousands of dollars up front does not help at all.

During our 8 years in this business, almost all our original competitors in the same market either went out of business or
completely stopped their software development…

and there were also new comers who never tried to change the situation for you...

Extensive community Features to
Encourage Your visitors to join and participate!

Our forum software has been carefully designed to include…

• Step by step registration process, guiding Your members from choosing available user names to verifying their emails after registration!
• User Welcome Message – sent to users automatically upon registration. You can tailor the content to Your community easily from the control panel!
• Fast full-text search capabilities with results sorted by relevance, date, or forum – Not only do Your members have a very easy way to search through messages, they also get the most relevant results on the top!
• Instant email notification, message digest, RSS feeds throughout the software to keep users informed of latest forum activities!
• Get visitors to join with the new List-Only permission that shows only the message subjects to visitors, while keeping the real content hidden until they register an account!
• WYSIWYG message composing interface w/ Spell Checker – allowing Your members to easily and quickly format their messages and check for errors!
• Support Multiple File Attachments within messages w/ upload Progress Bar – giving users ability to share anything (photos, pdf documents, etc.) within their messages, plus visual cues that keeps users informed about the uploading progress!
• Encourage Sharing of useful information – Reward Point System allowing users to reward whoever provides the best answer/comment! Members can also mark messages as helpful to show appreciation to people who participated in the discussion.
• Allow members to engage in private conversations (Private Messaging, i.e. in-forum email) with each other, plus personal Contact List to easily locate their friends.
• Members can easily attach external Photos and Youtube video to their messages, without having to use plain links when referring to stuff they find interesting on the ‘Net!

User-friendly, Web 2.0 UI that makes
navigating through Your community easy!

With our ASP.NET forum software, you get…

• Less cluttered UI with DHTML menu – simplifies and avoids scattered links everywhere on the page, distracting the message viewing experience.
• Minimal amount of page refreshes with AJAX operations – Your members can enjoy more responsive pages without watching page loading and reloading!
• Tabbed interface in the User Control Panel – no longer suffer lengthy scroll downs on pages with long lists of options!
• No popup windows, but DHTML windows for various features in the software that play nicely with internet security software – users don't have to leave the current page and can minimize, maximize, and move these windows just like regular popup’s!
• User can turn on / off many options on the forum, giving full control to the users – e.g. allowing users to hand pick relevant forums to show on the page, hide other people's signatures and avatars from the message, disable private message notifications, etc.

Configure the software without having to touch any code,
and enjoy total control over user / forum permissions!

Within the Admin Control Panel of the forum software, you can…

• Easily turning features on / off through the control panel without resorting to code hacks!
• Setting up site-wide / forum / gallery specific Announcements
• Complete control over Server messages (e.g. registration notification, email notification, etc.) using fully documented symbols to customize each message to fit your community.
• Setting up User Groups for organizing users and granting different feature privileges for each group. e.g. you can have different Private Message storage limit and different file upload limit for different groups.
• Custom Registration Fields –allowing you to collect additional data on the registration form to really get to know your members!
• Forum management with extensive group based permission - giving you ability to fine-tune permissions for different groups of users on your forums. This feature has been totally refined to support Permission Inheritance which greatly simplifies the process by allowing sub forums to inherit settings directly from the parent forums.
• Bad Words / User Name / Email Domain filters – allowing You to prevent malicious users from entering inappropriate words into their messages, and block certain user names/emails from entering Your membership system.
• Forum Statistic / Reporting - giving you freedom to design and gather statistics on Your forum usage. You have unlimited possibilities with this feature and You can even schedule stats to run periodically!

Fully Integrated Web Photo Gallery -
sharing photos among members is fun and easy!

We bundled a complete gallery application with our ASP.NET forum software, giving users the freedom to share and organize their photos with the community!

• Each Member can set up own albums to easily share and organize photos!
• Members can upload multiple photos at once to save time!
• AJAX photo loading w/ transition effect - provide for superior photo viewing experience for your users!
• Photos are automatically resized to adapt to different screen sizes!
• You can easily browse through the entire album with the built-in Slideshow capability!
• Members can post comments, add photos to favorites, and search photos based on title and description!
• As the community owner, You have the freedom to set different permissions for each gallery and for each user group.
• This is a full-featured, standalone photo application integrated fully with our powerful message board software to add tremendous value to Your community!

Complete “Look and Feel” Customizability –
Easily Transform this online community into YOUR community!

Our ASP.NET forum software supports the following customizable elements…

• Theme and Skin capability – giving You total control over CSS and Images for Your forum to easily match Your web site’s Look and Feel! You can also set up multiple themes for users to choose from!
• Master Page (common HTML code container) – fit your site design by adding common elements to the forum easily, like company logo, website header/footer, disclaimer, etc. to a single file without modifying the software code!
• Templates – Part of the UI system is a template-driven engine, which means You can change the way messages and forums are presented (like removing a column or two from the display). This template system is ASP.NET User Control based which means You can easily leverage your existing programming knowledge without having to learn a proprietary framework!
• Built-in Support for International Languages – allowing You to easily change the user interface to French, for example, without having to touch the code. If You desire, You can even set up multiple language files for Your users to choose from in order to accommodate a broader range of visitors.
• Complete source code for all pages, user controls, and their code behind files (*.aspx; *.ascx; *.aspx.vb; *.ascx.vb files) PLUS all database stored procedures – you have full control over the logic and flow to modify the software behavior!

The following software features will help you down the road
when your community starts rolling!

• You can set up “Trial period” for your community - e.g. giving new members access to certain private forums for 30 days, allowing You to increase the incentives for them to become paid members OR simply as a tool to set up subscription in order to continue to participate in the community.
• You can post events on the Integrated Community Calendar - letting you members know what events are going on, and they can discuss specific events on the forum!
• Utilize the Built-in Poll system - Members can attach a poll to their messages, and start collecting opinions in the most convenient way! Admins will have control to see who voted and set end date for a poll.
• We have built-in support for Integration with Your own membership database - You can easily integrate your own membership database (ASP.NET Membership Provider model) with the software seamlessly, so Your existing members do not have to register again for using the forum, and with this built in capability, You DO NOT NEED TO WRITE A LINE OF CODE AT ALL either!
• Single-Sign-On support - in addition to the integration with existing membership database, You can also achieve single-sign-on easily, that is, Your users only need to sign in once anywhere on your site, and they will be recognized throughout Your entire site!
• Search Engine Optimized URL – improve Your SE rankings with content relevant URLs for Your forums and messages, and thus drive in more traffic from the search engines!
• Threaded interface and Printable interface for messages - your members can view messages with parent-child hierarchy listings instead of just the traditional flat layout, and can also utilize a special page to facilitate printing messages!
• Message Rating system - allowing Your members to rate messages and give the message author certain “scores” for his quality information.
• Dispute resolution center - dedicated ticketing system w/ instant notification to resolve issues among users. Sometimes discussion goes out of hand and this special system is designed so that moderators (forum level admins) can resolve disputes professionally with your members without using the forum and the private messaging system.

Smooth and responsive page under high traffic load:
allowing you to focus on Growing your community instead of worrying about technical difficulties!

We invested more time and energy in PERFORMANCE and Scalability than anything else when designing this forum software…

• Over the years, we have been proven to be one of the best performing forum software right out of the box on the net, without extra code modification or expensive hardware.
• We spend a lot of time working closely and extensively with clients to account for all possible situations that may become performance bottle necks. The result is very assuring; making our software the best choice even on shared hosting solutions!
• There are several special technology we used to improve in this area – namely selective caching, refined stored procedures, fine-tuned software logic + data access layer, and we tested the software extensively using third party software for memory leaks  (You just don’t see this level of refinement anywhere else)!

Here are a few feedbacks we received about performance:

We do about 4000 posts per day and receive enormous traffic. Our backend dual xeon proc DB barely breaks a sweat.

I'm not sure what sort of processor usage we would see on them running the entire application and db on one server but overall the scalability of aspg is better than VB IMHO. We have 150,000 registered members at RCU and grow about 6000+ per month.  ( ~5000 active users, 4.5 million+ posts 2 years ago, now 10000+ active users with 8.6 million posts, avg. 1 post every 26 seconds)
Marc
RCUniverse.com

We do have more than 17,000+ posts per day and roughly 0.25 million pages a day. We do see 1250 different ip's in last 20 min and more than 1 thousand connections/sec.

Search is the key feature of this forum. You can find every word in more than 2 million post below a second.  (6.5 million posts 3 years ago, and now 31 million posts w/ 4500 active users)
Gun
Donanim Haber.com

Performance, performance, performance!
This app ROCKS in performance due to the smart design .. Our boards now deliver pages in less than a second.
… It's also "pretty", and the support is great. I'd be willing to bet You'd be hard pressed to find a better one, regardless of platform, period. Someone aptly said this forum is the "KING" -- it really is, YOU just don't know it yet... check it out!
Gene Grant
CEO, Ovusoft, LLC

I converted over to ASPPG. We have 42138 users and over 230000 posts. Everything went smooth as glass.
… after the switch to ASPPG I have not seen the CPU usage go above 20%. It is like going from a bicycle to Porsche!
I was able to integrate right into my current membership system and everything! I still can’t get over how fast it is running.
Thanks again.
Lance Ramsay
Webmaster
Hunting.Net

Numerous security measures in place -
Keeping you members safe from spam and
your community safe from malicious attacks!

Security is one of the top criteria when we designed the forum software, and we offer you…

• Forum Spam prevention – integrated Captcha completely stops malicious bots from SPAMMING (repeat posting) your forums! Spam Bot is a piece of software designed to launch attacks automatically and repeatedly.
• Community Self-Moderation – members can mark messages as spam and trigger the auto message hiding mechanism. This can also be set up to auto-ban members temporarily who violate the rules of Your community.
• Site-Wide Error Logger - logging all hacking attempts with complete comprehensive data so that you can analyze the attacks. This system can also serve the purpose of nailing bugs in the software to facilitate patching!
• IP filters to fend off malicious users from certain geographical regions. You can also get the violators’ IPs from the Error Logger feature mentioned above!
• SQL Injection Prevention – with our secure data access layer (DAL) anddata sanitization logic, Your community is completely immune to SQL injection attack!
  
  SQL Injection attack basically refers to security holes in the software that allow malicious users anywhere on the ‘Net to take control of your database, bypassing the software interface.
• By utilizing ASP.NET’s data and event validation capabilities, we can prevent malicious attacks from even touching the software!
• By utilizing ASP.NET’s Forms Authentication to handle the “keep myself logged in” feature, we can prevent cookie from being hijacked by malicious users!

And It Is NEVER JUST ABOUT FEATURES;
You also get Dedicated Customer Support behind the software!

A software package does not count at all if the support behind it is lousy. We dedicate as much energy and time into supporting our customers as we designing the software.

We never leave bug reports unattended, and we deal with issues directly on our forum with frequent hot fixes or code modifications, so that customers are always on top of reported issues and never have to ask more than once for help.

As a community owner, you have access to the following resources:

• Free E-mail Support for general forum issues
• Free Forum Support for general forum issues and bug fixes
• Free Knowledge Base and Tutorials Forum access with code samples and FAQ’s

Here is what our users have to say about our support service:

"I wish to strongly commend ASPPlayground, and in particular, Samuel Chou, for his tremendous level of support… the level of service has been nothing short of outstanding.  
… I will strongly recommend both this person and company based on these initial experiences and only wish more companies had the same ethic."
Ross Goldberg
Threshold Trading

Samuel,

You rule! You are literally the best supported software I've ever used and the most responsive to good feature requests. That is unfortunately a rare thing these days. If You ever need a glowing reference. Send them to me. Seriously.
Marc
RCUniverse.com

Your support is top notch, I wish more software companies gave this level of support.
Michael Brown
MikePortnoy.com

Here are a few more...

Free Software #1: Membership and Role Providers
($149 value)

We have briefly touched upon integration with existing membership database, but what if you are just starting up with a new web site and want to utilize the forum’s membership database as the backend for your entire site?

Now you can do so easily with our own Membership + Role Providers!

It is no-brainer to set up (full instructions included), and You do not have to know anything about our database structure at all to begin utilizing the membership store!

With this bonus, you can easily do the following on your own site:

• add / delete users from the forum database,
• perform user authentication (login),
• reset passwords,
• add / delete User Groups,
• add / remove users from User Groups, and
• list all members as well as members from a specific User Group.

In addition, these membership providers work directly with ASP.NET’s built-in membership controls, for example, the login control and registration control that build user interface automatically for you.

Therefore, with this time-limited bonus, you do NOT even have to worry about building the User Interface before setting up a fully functional login / registration form on your web site!

We also provide a full working demo with this bonus to give you a very detailed walkthrough on how everything works when it is put together.

Free Software #2: Web Based Database Manager
($99 value)

Sooner or later you will find that you need to work with the database directly, like modifying a stored procedure to change the way data are sorted, or batch updating certain data outside the forum software. As I can’t possibly account for all potential uses of the data, it is impossible to build UI ahead of time for every possible task.

And when it comes to working with data directly, WITHOUT this bonus Database Manager, You will have to fire up the bulky SQL Management Studio (don't forget to install it first) on your own computer, login to the server, connect to the database, start the Query interface, and finally get to work with the data.

Notice before you even start doing anything meaningful, there are lots of things to remember and several steps to go through!

And it has come to our attention that more and more hosting companies are now restricting connection to the database directly outside their company (e.g. your home), so even if you have the expertise to use the SQL Management Studio, YOU CAN’T do anything at all because your host does not allow it!

You see there is really a lot of troubles to go through just to do something with YOUR DATA!

Let’s see what you can do with this bonus Web Based Database Manager:

• modify stored procedures,
• batch update database records,
• test run multiple SQL queries to see the results and roll back (full transaction support),
• execute long running queries by setting long time out value,
• upload and execute script files against Your database (write once, run multiple times),
• and basically EVERTYTHING else that your host grant you permission for, WITHOUT You having to worry about manually making the connection!

Free Software #3: Forum Message Extractor
($67 value)

With your community growing and collecting valuable user inputs every day, it is very likely that you will want to hand pick good articles from the forum and show them on your site so that they can be seen by any visitor.

Or, you may simply want to list a few topics on the side column on your web site to lure visitors to click and view your community.

Imagine how time wasting this task would be for you if you need to do all these manually with cumbersome copy / paste and have to remember to update the list...

With our message extractor bonus, you can

• Grab a list of topics from any forum and show them on your site
• Display selected messages with complete formatting on your site
• There are countless other uses of this capability, e.g., build an article repository separately, listing newest messages, build a site wide RSS feed based on forum content, etc.