ASPPlayground.NET is one of the most popular ASP/ASP.NET based forum software on the net, with the more sites featuring on Big-boards.com than any of our competitors based on the same technology. While being the most popular, we don't skimp on the quality of our support service. Don't trust my words, just read along to find out more:
Testimonials
We use this software for http://forum.cakewalk.com, supporting thousands of users and 700k's of posts. It has never let us down despite this heavy load and nearly constant usage. Re. Support: I had a few issues related to some customization I was trying to do. Samuel replied to every question within 24 hours and gave an answer that solved the problem.
Ron Kuper, cakewalk.com
I was looking for a replacement to our old php-based forums, as they were running extremely slowly and crashing a lot. ASPPlayground seemed to be the best of what was on offer, so I bought it. Initial setup was fast and incredibly simple, and all the variable options were self-explanatory or had indepth help. And even when I got stuck, the support forums are top-notch! It took me perhaps four hours to setup in total, not bad for such a complex piece of software. It's got everything you'd expect from a forum and more, and is much more easily customisable than other forums I've used. The only problems I had were with our server not the software itself. In fact the only bit that was a little confusing was setting up moderators - you have to tick a box next to a username and then select a group to assign them to from a drop-down menu. Of course as soon as you know what to do, it's as simple as the rest of it. If you want to see just how fast and intuitive these forums are, check ours out! Can't recommend it enough!
Nick Dablin, www.attitude.uk.com
I've been using the software now for over 2 years and I now have over 22,000 members with over 500k posts. The support has been fantastic! Anytime I've had a question, I've had a response in less than 24 hours, and most of time I've had a response not more than an hour after I've posted my question. The code is so cleanly written that I was easily able to go in and customize the site to my needs. My favorite thing about the forum is probably the fact that it has a built in Search Engine friendly "Mode" which helps the major search engines get all the pages indexed.
Amanda Allen, Dodgeforum.com
We are currently using ASPP for a community of close to 1 million users. we get decent traffic in the forums (500 posts per day, 300-500 concurrent users) and have seen no issues and plenty of room to grow. We are planning to grow our community to 20,000-50,000 posts per day with 5000-10,000 concurrent users and we're not anticipating any problems. Excellent application with excellent support. Highly recommended.
John Seiferth, Richdad.com
From the purchase to the installation to the customizing - this forum software ROCKS! It has everything built in that I used to have to load separate software for. It's woth twice the price!
Bill Koenig
This is just a update of my review of ASPPlayground from June 2003. After 2 years of use, I find this forum application to be better than ever. Many more features have been added, including an image gallery, RSS support and an outstanding site integration package. In addition, there is now a direct ported .NET version and the future holds a completely rewritten .NET version. A word about performance. I've seen a site with a single forum having over 850 pages of topics. The application never misses a beat! VERY PLEASED!
John Arnold, bayloafer.com
We're very pleased with this forum software! Over the past three months, we've looked into every nook and corner of the code, tweaked it to match the look and feel of our website, and set it up to meet our public and private forum needs. It has met our needs at every step. As impressive as the software itself is the support provided by the main developer and a very active community of users at the ASP Playground's own forum. I can't speak highly enough of the quality of the support and the responsiveness of the developer! It's also great the way the community of users is able to contribute to the direction of future development with suggestions that are carefully listened to. Even though we've done a lot of customization to the ASP code for the visual look of the forum, applying an upgrade and a couple patches has not been a problem. We just add comments where we make changes and use a file comparison utility when incorporating updated files. However, it is also possible to do some customization to the look of the forum without touching the ASP code and, in that case, applying the updates is mouse-click simple. Our forum is not very active yet, but I have looked at many other installations of this software, some of which are handling many thousands of users, topics, and posts without a glitch (very well designed use of the database behind the scenes). Although the documentation of administration features is somewhat weak, I've always been able to find the answers I need by either reading existing topics on their forum or posting my questions. Great stuff!
Tosh Golias zolldata.com
Long time Snitz user but moved for better performance and tons of new features without having to integrate buggy Snitz mods. First class and SUPER QUICK support on the few problems I did have with my migration. Don't waste another minute evaluating forums. Buy this one now - there aren't any better ones out there.
Justin R., FreeGolfInfo.com
Samuel, the author, has produced an awesome asp based forum that easily outperforms all other forums I have used on our site (www.frontpagewebmaster.com) He listens to his customers and is always striving to go that extra mile to add new useful features and in support of his product. I can fully recommend this product to anyone looking for a Windows Server forum application.
Spooky Awol, Frontpagewebmaster.com
You will find lots of five star reviews here from users with large communities, fifteen thousand plus users and over one and half million posts, but I want to speak as the little guy. At the time of writing my hobby related site is nearly a year old and growing nicely considering there aren't a lot of people who collect antique bottles! My original reason for choosing ASPPlayground was that compared with all the others it looked like a quality product. And you know what - it is a quality product! I was a little bit nervous about installing and running it but I needn't have been. I have accessed a lot of support over the years (I am the kind of customer that support departments tell stories about!). Samuel and his team are quite frankly the best I have come across. I have had my hand held on a number of occasions and I always get treated as if I was their most important client. Lighting fast response too! ASPPlayground has every conceivable feature but that doesn't stop a regular flow of new ideas and new releases with increased functionality. And this is what I really like - the new feature list is to a large extent user driven. Over on the support forums possible new features are discussed and Samuel joins in. If it's a good idea it gets put in the pipeline and appears in a future release. And how about this for us little guys - my small forum has nearly five thousand pages indexed in Google! Just tick a few boxes in the admin panel, if you want it, and a few days later you're everywhere in the search engines. There is a limited amount of space allowed for this review and there is one last thing I want to say. If someone offered you a free middle of the range family sedan or for a couple of hundred dollars you could have a Lamborghini Murciélago which would you go for? It's a no brainer isn't it - a bit like choosing ASPPlayground! To all the team at ASPPLayground - Thank you.
Roger S. anitque-bottles.net
We chose ASP Playground because we wanted to have a well-programmed, scalable solution with good support. We are completley satisfied with the software. The forum is fast and stable. It is easy to install and to administrate. Samuel, the developer, offers excellent, timely support, takes user suggestions seriously and is always available to answer questions. One other bonus is that the forum integrates seamlessly with SigmaChat so your users do not need to re-login to access the chat.
Mark Devlin, Japantoday.com
After surfing through the internet searching for a suitable forum for one of my sites i stumbled upon ASPPlayground and life has been just brilliant ever since. We got the forum up and running in no time. Translating the forum was very simple. The users love it, we love. Everybody is just thrilled. Samuel and his partners are brilliant in their support and always find the time to answer your question ASAP.
Gudmundur Magnusson, Liverpool.is
I needed a high end Forum for a VERY picky client. It was required that the forum be search engine friendly. I did a lot of research and went with ASPPlayground's 2.0 Advanced Edition. I had no experience with SQL or ASP.NET, yet I went from nothing to a fully polished message board within 4 _DAYS_. Any questions I had were answered within minutes even at 2:40AM on Sunday night! This will be my Forum platform for all my clients. If you need a true *solution* and are willing to pay for quality, look no further.
Dean Harris, ElegantWebs.com
We wanted a community forum for our Mystery Shoppers. After much internet searching ASP Playground was recommended to us. Boy are we glad. We were able to customize it to look like it was our own. The support is unbelievable as are the response times. We will post another review as things get running but urge any potential shoppers to stop and pick up this product.
John Saccheri, Mystiqueshopper.com
ASP Playground provides excellent support of their software. How many times have you e-mailed a developer and received no response? Each time in the last 31 days that I've e-mailed them, I've gotten a detailed solution. I'm administering the forum. The help files included are awesome. The forum is fast. It works into my page very well. Basically, it is a great place to start a web community. I just wish it was open-source as well so I could run it elsewhere. ASP doesn't work on my primary Apache host. Regardless, it works on the host I'm using for my forum. And I'm very pleased with the performance, support and quality of this software. I've many forums and this is one of the better ones that you can purchase. Really like it! Great job guys.
Marc David, Discussbodybuilding.com
Impressive! Setting up the site was simple. The administration interface is exceptionally well laid out making it easy to find out the extensive administrative controls (e.g. user and group management, user ranking system, announcement tool, forum maintenance tasks). We especially appreciated the ability to set up private forums. Along with this comes the ability to set up member groups with special access to specific forums. Using css it provides great control over color scheme. All in all the most complete package we looked at (we evaluated about 10 other ASP packages). Highly, highly recommended.
Sebo dapper, HorizonHobby.com
I converted over to ASPPG. We have 42138 users and over 230000 posts. Everything went smooth as glass. We have a dual AMD 1800+ with 2 GB RAM running between 80-100% CPU usage with my previous service (VERY SLOW), after the switch to ASPPG I have not seen the 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!
Lance Ramsay, Hunting.net
I installed the forum software one month ago and have been using it since. It was easy to install, especailly by following Samuel's instructions. The software is packed with features. The administrator has many options to choose from in the admin panel to customize the forums. I had a few questions on using the software, and Samuel always responded quickly to my emails - he must monitor his email day and night!! The forums looke really great compared to many other inferior packages others have out there. I'll report back in a few months on how it is going under a heavy load, but so far it is working flawlessly.
John Murray, Cigar-trader.com
The ASP Playground Forum SQL is very easy to install and configure. It is very powerful, has cool features and you get all that for a very reasonable price. The support is exceptionally good, and if you look at the developement so far (I started up with the Access version a year ago), the future should be eaven brighter. congratulations to the ASP Playground Forum SQL - Team. Great job guys!
Andreas Walz, Kavo.com
We had this site downloaded and integrated with our existing user management system in about 10 minutes. Five more, and it was styled to match our site. It's super-easy to install, configure and deploy, and the authors are VERY quick to respond to your support posts. They're also communicative and reponsive to feature requests, taking a very democratic and fair approach to the process. It's a pay product, but it's worth EVERY penny, quid, peso or whatever currency you have to buy it.
Dustin Miller, SharePointExperts.com
About 3 months ago I switched to a new hosting provider and they recommended I consider replacing my current Message board with an ASP Playground forum, so I looked. When I was using my forum I felt that out of the box it was limited. Yeah you could add stuff on, but something about me having to go into the code and make all these mods didn't sit well with me. So, I checked out ASP Playground and it had everything I wanted, Private Messages, Email Validation, Sticky Topic, Banning ability and much more. These all seem to be very common features needed to run a board right? Well, with the other I had YOU have to add them! I can't remember how many times the guy who wrote the MOD for my last forum left something out or wasn't clear and it broke my board. With ASP Playground you almost can't go wrong, and I am not just saying that. Samuel runs an outstanding support forum for his customers. Any time I have asked a question he gets a response to me in minutes, not hours or days. Although I havn't been with ASP Playground long enough to go through a upgrade, I can only imagine how easy it will be. One addition that I would like to see to the software is a Chat component, but it isn't a necessary. If you are trying to pick a forum to use on your site, don't look any further than ASP Playground. You would be waisting your time if you did. For the $97.00, or whatever the cost of the commercial license is, it is well worth it. My time is much more valuable to me and I would assume yours is as well. Thanks again Samuel.
Sean Delaney, Miami-Hurricanes.com
I have been an ASP Playground Forum software user since December 2002 and have been very satisfied with the selection. I use this software as a part of my Family History website. I am a software developer myself (35 years) and cannot say enough for the stability and support (especially support) for this product. There was a mention of "slow loading" in one or two of the reviews. I must say I have not seen this on my or any of the other sites that use this software that I have seen. I am well aware that there is forum software available that is free or costs less, however I made the purchase and haven't looked back. In my opinion you can't go wrong if you select ASP Playground as your forum software.
I have used Snitz forums before, had to put much time in it to include all kinds of modules which were obviously not supported by anyone. Aspplayground.net is an all inclusive forum. Feature request are mostly listened to. Or you are given a reason why a specific feature will not be implemented. If a feature is not implemented it is because aspplayground does not want to comprimise the performance. By buying this forum it saved me lots of time and therefore money in stead of programming hours and hours on free forums.
Software setup is a breeze, very easy. System is very stable running this software, everything is fast and efficient. Built-in features are well engineered and have a great look and feel. MUCH better than the free alternatives out there. Have been running a 5K+ user Snitz forum for about 4 years not, ASP Playground made me a true believer!!
the only thing I could want would be integration into DNN (Dot Net Nuke) but that is beyond the scope of the software. The support has been incredible, updates are always being developed, not waiting for "major" releases. Very good application for any price. When I had a bug, which I was converting a forum to this app they held my hand through the process and answered all questions either immediately or within 24 hours. I recommend them highly and the forum can be viewed at http://forums.sixgunner.com using the dynamic header footer which is included as a feature, I can make the forum look like it is actually part of my dotnetnuke and store application. This makes the site look very professional and integrated. I recommend highly.
Thousands of our users are browsing about millions of our messages with about the tenth of a second. I couldn't believe this forum can't be fast that much but it is. If you have a good internet connection you feel like browsing in your computer. Search is also very fast by the full text search. You can find every little message. It is fast so it won't hit your servers cpu. Html extensions are very search engine friendly, if you had a good rank in google you could find your every message indexed in google. Very responsive support, they won't stop until finding solutions, they care every one I never seen this kind of. Photo uploading to messages is usable for every one. RSS feature is available. Snitz conversion utilities are ready and this is the next stop of Snitz Forum. New features are added frequently. I worth every penny. From my eyes it is very cheap for what he is doing. If you buy now you could have the .net version for free. We were using Snitz, and we had %100 percent load of dedicated Dual Amd Opteron's. Now we have two times users browsing and cpu's are only %20 percent loaded with all other site applications. Skin feature isn't included but it is planed. After making suggestions you can feel every good ideas will be implemented. Updates are about just clicking few buttons. We have been running our forum about 3 years and this new software boosted our registered users to 2 times, just in 4 months. Only problem is the looking of forum is not very I pleasing. Customizing is possible because of you can edit every code. There is some mods at their forum but great mods are added to forum code so there is not much. This forum has a great future.
Here is a very short list of our clients:
RCUniverse.com -
The biggest forums for anything about Radio Control.
FreeGolfInfo.com -
The World's largest golf community. Free membership, access to our services for golf enthusiasts and more.
Drum and Base Arena -
The biggest & most up-to-date Drum&Bass site on the internet. Mission is to provide Drum&Bass to the world.
Empire Online
-
Chat, debate and share ideas as part of the Internet's most vibrant film community.
HuntingBBS.Com -
The Ultimate Hunting, Fishing, Shooting and Outdoors message board
Ovusoft.com -
the online community for readers of "Take Control of Your Fertility".
Crosswalk.com , Christianity.com, and YouthWorker.com-
an active group of Christians with a desire to connect with others.
Highlifter.com -
The Leader in custom after-market ATV accessories.
Mustang Forums -
Discussion forums for Ford Mustang owners and enthusiasts.
Matrixgames.com -
Matrix Games Community was formed by gamers who love to play games.
BattleOn Forums -
forum for the action-packed, fully animated RPG game of AdventureQuest
LocoGringo.com -
travel/vacation advice, trip reports and tourist discussion message boards for the Mayan Riviera.
Cakewalk.com -
the world’s leading developer of powerful and easy to use products for music creation and recording
MikePortnoy.com -
the official site of the famous drummer Mike Portnoy.
Dodge Forum -
Dodge Enthusiast Forums for Ram Dakota Charger, etc.
DealCatcher.com
an online resource that helps shoppers find coupons, rebates, promotions
and the best prices for over 500 online merchants.
The Games Village Forums -
all you need for your online gameplay for some of the most popular PS2 games available.
Horse.com -
A place to talk about horses
Donanimhaber.com -
The most popular Turkish Hardware News site with the most popular computer hardware related forum in Turkey. The largest overall forum in Turkey.
FrontpageWebmaster.com -
the online learning community for everything FrontPage.
ClubGP.com -
an online resource for Grand Prix owners around the world!
theSouthTown.com -
Cool P.O.D fan site
OurLaughingPlace.com -
"We know everybody has a laughing place, and we desire that the fun we have with this website helps you find yours."
Techbargains.com -
Find the best products in technology at bargain prices.
Japan Today -
The world's leading source of Japan news.
Dactrung.com -
"a political-free environment to those who can read and write
Vietnamese."
DevBuzz.com -
popular Pocket PC developer's site.
Antique-bottles.net -
Antique bottle collectors forum
DiscussBodybuilding.com -
Discuss bodybuilding, weight lifting, supplements, dieting, nutrition
and more at this large online bodybuilding forum.
and many, many more!!
