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Hey all –

I’m posting this in here….but feel free to move to a more appropriate forum category if need be. I’m also new and haven’t read much of anything in here to get a feel for the community and all, so I apologize for the lack of foreplay.

I own http://www.easyloungin.com/ that is a (weak) WP + (strong) bb combo. By weak I mean that we could do and are planning on doing a much better job with pushing out content and reviews by a regularly contributing few dozen community members for a new WP front page. The singletrackworld.com that was #1 on the October 2010 Top 100 list is a good example of where we’d like to head. For something within the snowboard industry as a benchmark I would reference yobeat.com. A new theme that I already have on a test server is http://www.wpzoom.com/demo/yamidoo/.

And by strong I mean that I just saw that our relatively small member base of less than a couple thousand at this point had the 15th most posts of all the bbpress forums out there on the October showcase thing. Who know that snowboarders were so verbose?? Well, even though it’s only been in existence for 15 months or so, the core of the forums community members migrated over en masse at once from Burton Snowboards’ message board infamously referred to as the BMB. So the pump was more than primed in this case.

Burton lost the BMB because they didn’t engage what was the dominant message board community dating back to the late 90’s. Then in August of 2009 they just announced that they were no longer going to host a message board and instead had a new social / facebook style community. A month later they re-hooked up the forums called the BMB to their new http://burton.kontain.com/, but the exodus had already occurred.

I was a member of the BMB, and being a co-owner of a ski and snowboard shop in Lake Tahoe, I saw lots of opportunities with creating an insta-community that pumps out a ton of raw, honest, irreverent, yet extremely relevant content to the core snowboard user. So we threw together easyloungin.

But then I had lots of health issues in the last year, and really for about 8 months up until a couple ago I’ve been absent. I’ve got a solid crew of employees, of course, who work for my “day job”, but the truth is that this easyloungin has just taken a backseat up till now.

Well my team wants to slick it up like I already said, however, they’re recommending migrating to buddypress and completely leaving the bbpress environment. I get the groups and the integration that my web guys are showing me with buddypress, but to me I haven’t seen a site that still gives me the “old fashioned” message board feel and use that my community likes.

Again, I know very little of this community – and no I didn’t use the search bar – so if there are some good pre-canned answers / threads that have dealt with extremely similar instances, then please direct me there.

If you’re still reading now – and to make a long story short – then maybe you could help answer why I should resist moving to buddypress and stay with bbpress?