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@Velocio
Vanilla is too sparse when it's out of the box. I've added 37 extensions and you still can't upload images and avatars, it still doesn't know how to do a 'right arrow' (>) and I don't know whether you've noticed but the "read" functionality is flakey, and now that we have some large threads like the 'spotted' thread it is failing to calculatue the number of pages correctly (I'm assuming wherever that functionality is, that it's including the number of whispers that exist in the thread and that throws the page numbers out of whack).
All that, and it takes a second to load a page.
Lightweight and clean Vanilla is not (this server has 1GB of RAM, for just this one website... it's a bit excessive), except in terms of the visual style.
vBulletin isn't as pretty out of the box, but it can do avater uploads, image uploads, correct embedding of HTML, faster page rendering, lower memory usage, better private messaging (like, you can actually CC other people!), better alerts and subscriptions, and it can actually be extended easier. Oh yeah, and you get polls, and the ability to put events in the calendar and then have people say they're attending it (solves the lists thing).
My big gripe with vBulletin is the visual style. But I'm happy to consider working with some of the designers on here to get that to look nice. It can be done.
The thing that people mentioned about compartmentalising... well you can use click "New Posts" in vBulletin and it looks just like the Vanilla home page. So it's a bit redundent... both can look like each other, Vanilla has the categories page, vBulletin has a "New Posts" page.
Anyhow, the Vanilla core code base obviously has problems. For an out of the box forum engine it's good, but the sheer volume of extensions required to get it to work in a good way is nuts. The extensions are pretty low quality too, lack of pagination on the members page and search functionality will lead me to remove that soon.