SocialEngine Review – Is it Good Enough for your Social Network?

By Mike Johnston on April 6, 2009 · 58 Comments

SocialEngine has been around for a few and we’ve enjoyed trying it out and seeing it develop into a more and more powerful system as the years go by. We decided to share the experience with our readers and show you the true power this system possesses. If you are looking for a system that’s affordable and works well as a social networking product.. then this is definitely a very solid choice and one of the better options on the market today. It’s also very reasonably priced at about $250 for a license. Let’s examine it in today’s SocialEngine Review

Here’s how the install process looks for those interested:

You get your license key from them upon purchase which, as we said, is pretty reasonably priced at $250.You then enter your database details on the next screen and submit

Now that you have your login information, you can proceed to the control panel and get started by playing around with it.

Their administrative interface is nice and clean and very easy to use. There are tons of options and it's very easy to use and configure.

Above you can see the default look of the system before you do any modifications. Let’s create an account and play a bit
shall we?

Below is my test user's profile with an avatar i found and uploaded. Very easy to do.

SocialEngine also has a number of plugins which can be installed and configured for use. Plugins are available for between
$30 to $50 depending on the plugin. In this case, we have all of the plugins that are not third party.

There is some pretty amazing functionality built into SocialEngine. Let’s install some of the plugins and see how they work/look.

Here is the compose screen from the blog editor. once installed, it’s fully functional and works very well. Looks like it uses TinyMCE by default.

It has a very nice chat module that can be added to it. All of the modules are very fast to load up including this chat which is nice. It appears they have put a lot of work into making sure everything is quick and functional. This isn't just some slapped together product.. SocialEngine is very sleek.

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Here is a screenshot of the classifieds section (once the module has been installed). This particular module is a great way to monetize your site as well should you choose.

There is also a nice events plugin which lets you create upcoming events either for yourself or others.

This plugin is for music uploads. One comment on it would be that it lacks an effective admin entry and there doesn’t appear to be an easy way to modify the number of files or file sizes (that I could find).

There is also the ability to add polls.

And finally, the last plugin we tested was the videos plugin. It works beautifully with Youtube and uploads.

Overall, We’d say this is one heck of a great collection of modules and software that can be used to put together one heck of a killer social network.

It’s easy to theme and easy to customize as well so you can create your own unique look without much effort. For the cost they are charging for this, you could put together an amazingly well equipped social network with very minimal effort.

The admin panel is incredibly straight forward and simple as well.

The SocialEngine team has done an outstanding job on this great product. It’s no wonder it has such a large number of users.

Check out SocialEngine

Tagged with → cms • socialengine

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Mike Johnston

Mike is a CMS Analyst & Consultant who founded CMS Critic in 2008. He regularly consults with companies to assist them with the CMS selection process and is available for speaking engagements. You can contact him here or follow him on Google Plus.

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http://www.dotwebsolutions.com Amanda

We built several sites on the Social Engine platform. It was quick to set up but totally lacked any kind of real improvements for our sites. The plugins were nickel and dimeing us to death. We now develop all our social sites with Drupal Commons. The functions are almost limitless and never a cost. The really nice part is it is SEO/SEM capable. Happy to give my knowledge and help to anyone who needs help. Not sure if I am able to put a contact in here but we are dot web solutions. I am not selling my help, just willing to share. I know the frustration. email is contact at dotwebsolutions sorry if this is a violation.
http://sportsbrick.com Jesus Martinez

My SE site was freeze. I realize that taking out the feed activity, all my pages work great taking 3 or 4 secs to charge. I put any WALL widget, the time get up to 10 or 15 secs to charge a page WTF. I waiting for an answer from HIRE-Experts WALL PLUGIN, I give your news forward.

WHO CAN HAVE A SOCIAL NETWORK WITHOUT FEED ACTIVITY??? :(
Neo Asterix

FYI I made the same mistake buying a software called Pinnect, it’s a Pinterest close, the worse software I ever checked. I bought it because it’s based on Yii and I like this framework, I wasted 200$ and, at this point, I would better have bought Social Engine instead, even with all its issues it is far better than this Pinnect shit!
kingwill

thank u guys. i was about to buy SE and now i will switch to some other software.
http://www.facebook.com/martinpolsgaire.omaolmhuaidh Martín Pól Sgàire O’Maolmhuaidh

I have to say I have been very disappointed with Social Engine. When the support period expired, I still had a number of issues – glitches in the software – that hadn’t, and still haven’t, been resolved. I feel very strongly that customers shouldn’t be expected to pay for support to deal with defects in the product they’ve purchased. I am now going to have to pay them $50 for the privilege of asking them to fix bugs that were in their software when I bought it! That’s really quite outrageous.

There are other problems. The software itself just doesn’t have much functionality (unless you’re prepared to pay top dollar for customization). For example, the chat room is primitive. There is no option to kick or ban users, no word filters, no customization options, no conversation logs, no text colour palette, no audio alerts, no “broadcast” options etc. It’s just a rudimentary chat room like the ones that were offered with freeby websites 20 years ago.

The same goes for the “browse members” search box. It has a field for “Name”, followed by two dropdowns for “Age” (presumably “from” to “to”), followed by “I am a… (select Male or Female)”. This is meaningless! When someone joins they generally do not know the names of other members. And the search asks what *you* are, not what you’re looking for. There is no way to search for members with specific interests, or in certain locations, or with a particular sexual orientation (straight, gay, etc.). There are no parameters at all apart from “Name” (which is useless) and “Age” (90% of my members are in the same age group, so this is pretty much useless too). Most search boxes on social network sites allow you to search for members who share your interests, or who live in your area, or who have the same astrological sign as you, or whatever. The SE search box is meaningless. And useless.

The “Groups” feature is also useless. Members can join groups – but then what? There is nothing to encourage interaction. You can install a poll, but that’s about it. In order to approve new members to my groups I have to 1/ login to Groups, 2/ Login to a specific group (I have 6 groups, so I have to login to one after another). 3/ Click “Members” at the top. 4/ Click “View invited users and users waiting for approval/rejection”. 5/ Scroll down past all the “deleted members” (former members are still listed as “deleted members”), 6/ Click “Next” (because the “deleted members” list continues into another page). 7/ Scroll down until I come to the new members waiting to be approved (these are listed *after* all the “deleted members”, instead of at the beginning, which would make more sense). 8/ Select ONE member to approve (yes, you can only approve one member at a time). 9/ Click “Approve Request”. 10/ Wait for box to appear with an “Approve Request” button (despite the fact that I’ve just clicked an “approve request” link). Click that button and wait for another box to appear with the message “Request Approved”, and okay that. 11/ Start again! Because when you approve a request you are taken back to page one! So if I have six or seven requests to approve, it can take me at least half an hour. And that’s just one group! I have to go through the same lengthy procedure with all the other groups. So just approving members can take a couple of hours.
The members seeking approval should be listed on page one, with check boxes beside their names, and I should be able to tick the boxes and hit an “Approve” button. If it was set up that way, it would be possible to approve 6 members in less than a minute, instead of 30 minutes.

Basically, the whole thing is clunky and primitive. Sure, you can pay for customization, but the costs add up. Just to get the same level of functionality as Ning would probably cost $2,000 or more. And that’s on top of the cost of the license and the various essential add-ons. Oh, and $50 every time you find another bug in the software and have to contact SE support.
http://UnderConstruction;-) Naresh

Hi pals,

I have recently bought this social engine 4 and has been working on it.

To be frank enough, I was 100% satisfied by having a look at the social engine trial version, but after buying it, its a whole different story. After looking at the code, OMG why I have done such a mistake !

For example, for loading a single home page, the title of the page, the description of the page, the layout name, the order in which the widgets must be placed are all needs to be fetched from database…..!! To generate a simple static data, they are fetching data from database. I had a same question with their support team by raising a ticket. They clearly said “Yes, for the cost of easy customization and development we did not considered speed, we have did in this way. If you can modify it well and good…!!” (Am sure, if some social engine guy comes and comments on this that they havent done so, I will take a screenshot of my support ticket and paste it). How much of DB resource is wasted…..SPEED!!, even in localhost, the page loading is worse. thought I can save time after buying this, but trust me, am wasting my time understanding the way they have coded this. These people at least not even provide the technical documentation to understand the higher level architecture of this social engine, what a fun, they are selling code, but with no technical documentation. Am reverse engineering currently in order to debug everything and customize it, but I dont know when it is going to complete, may be at least half of my age.

Anyways, I thought of not writing anything bad about social engine, but their code forced me to do so, and even their suppor team’s response as well.

I am sure with technical documentation, we can customize it, else go for social engine’s developers and waste your more money.
NeoAsterix

What a pity, like many of you I was so happy to discover SE, it looks so sexy and I thought my researches were ended. Reading all these comments was a pinch that woke me up from my dream. Like another user said, I have one window opened on their buy button.
Considering the time that has passed I’d like to give it a chance hoping that they improved the code, but I’m too afraid to waste 300$ and spend the rest of my life fixing their code.
I think I’ll try phpFox, sadly :(
http://www.sanguinarium.net Saaron

After using SE4 for about 7 months I had to give up. The support was absolutely non responsive and when they do it is a round about question asking to access my code and no real solutions of how to admin the CP.

I had dreamed of a private social network for my customers since MySpace came out years ago and tried EVERYTHING on the market from SE to Vbulletin to PHPfox. Recently I asked SE to refund my money because I just wasted almost a year with their software and only 1 of 3 people I invited could complete the registration.

A friend suggested PHPfox and I just installed it yesterday and of my list of people who I invited EVERYONE had a quick and pleasant experience registering. This is just what I wanted. I hope SE gets their product and their tech support more functional soon as it could be a great product.

SE ended up refunding all of my tech support fees of some $300 and my customers are happy with my PHPFox site. Even though it lacks a good mobile app this is the best solution at the time and I am very happy with it.
http://sergey-oganesyan.ru/ Sergey Oganesyan

Good Engine, but expensive..
http://jerseypeeps.com William

Keep well clear, for a start the script is very slow loading, support is non-existent, especially if you add any 3rd party add-ons which are needed to bring at least some decent functions to a bog standard script.

Support will cost you £33 per month and as I stated if you have a 3rd party add-on and you have problems don’t expect any support what so ever, as I found out by adding a 3rd party add-on you break socialengines term and conditions of support.

I’m now stuck with a social website that has error after error and no support…….and i’m out of pocket by a few £500!!!
http://www.autotraderimports.com graeme

Ok smart guys!

If its not Se or build your own for zillions which way?

Dont bag anything or give long winded answers. Just say which script is best
- http://www.cmscritic.com Mike Johnston
  
  Read our phpfox review for a better suggestion.
ChicagoNole

I’m sooo happy I found this review. I literally have another window open, about to buy social engine.
Fine, I get it, it doesn’t work. What does?
I’m not looking for a social community, I’m looking for a system for my employees. I need to pull up their “profiles”…
suggestions?
- http://www.cmscritic.com Mike Johnston
  
  I’d need more details but have you read our phpFox review?
Daniel A.

WOW! I mean WOW!

There are a lot of people chiming in on this review. I believe that everybody is entitled to their experience. It would be foolish for me to contest anybody, but mine has been nearly the exact opposite.

I opted for the trial through Arvixe for two reasons. First, I get 30 days to test SE without paying (which would would have been a great approach for those of you that are on the fence or think your money wasn’t well spent); secondly, with a minor investment of $7.00 with Arvixe, I could gauge which hosting plan worked best and upgrade if needed.

I have found mixed results from the staff at SE, but I think they’ve started to finally reach a strong core team. I understand having built several companies that this is one of the most difficult challenges and I think they’ve overcome it.

Also, my experience with Arvixe has also been mixed, but usually most of their support staff through phone or chat has been effective for me (email was so-so).

I don’t have a base of 1 million or even 50,000, so perhaps that’s why the product works well for me.

I agree it is a bit slow at times, but I think that will change. To be fair, even major manufacturers have similar issues with new releases.

Hope it helps.
http://www.99factors.com roark

well, there is one social network i created using my own team of developers and it has everything in it. Its better than social engine and php fox. It has circles/lists and everything that fb or g+ has. we have 4 million users and its going pretty well. its on 99factors.com
what i want to tell everyone through this is..dont buy these cheap nonsense scripts , code your own things or hire developers and be original. social engine is crap. so is php fox.
David

Wow, definitely not going to buy this product anymore. Was just about to throw down nearly 1k for it too. Good thing I read this thread. Thanks for the info guys.
http://socialengine.net Social Engine Sucks

Anyone thinking about buying Social Engine, consider this: The coders are so incredibly poor that every time they come out with a new version (which you manually have to upgrade), it’s FULL of bugs. I’m talking LOADED with bugs.

Second, you only get 30 days of support and the support you do receive in that time period is horrible. A guy named Matt that knows absolutely nothing about anything is a total douche. He pretty much just sits back and replies “Well, I don’t know what the problem is. Thanks for contacting support.”

What’s worse, think about 2 months down the road when you upgrade and the new version has serious bugs (which EVERY new version has had). Do you think they will help you? Nope! On your own.

So stop and think for a minute… because Social Engine developers can’t code properly, your site is impacted by their negligence. At that point, your only option is to pay them $50 (after you have already poured hundreds into this buggy CMS) so they can give you mediocre at best service because their developers that caused the problem to begin with.

Their developers can’t code properly, your site gets screwed up, their coding causes the screwed up site, to get support, they make you pay $50 for 30 days. Talk about an upcharge. It’s pure extortion.

So the more bugs they load Social Engine up with, the more they know you will need service, so they can make more money causing damages to you.

I would like to put together a class action lawsuit against Social Engine. I know there are a lot of people out there that are in the same boat as me after spending so much time and money on this ‘white label’ piece of crap.
- http://420klub.net Bud Savage
  
  I quit trying to get support, and I quit trying to upload their updates. Seems I always get an error message which is why I am still running 4.1.6p3. You can contact me if you want lawsuit. Now I just berry my head in my pillow and ignore user complaints =(
Chad

I expect a high volume of members on my site around 1 million+. I am very concerned about what I am reading on here with respect to speed and member load.

Anyone have experience with the latest version of SE4?

Thanks,
Chad
mo

what if i get a professional web developer to install and customize my website using social engine will that work with no problems?.
Daniel

I’was just about to buy SE for a social proyect in Latin America but it looks like they are having so many problems, It seems like i have to do my research all over againg, come SE can you answer this guys…
- http://www.jibran.co.in Jibran
  
  Same here Daniel, I had made up my mind even forwraded the complete details to my customer , he is ready to pay…now …where should i go………
  i need a social network for moview lovers and strugglers(to get into movies)
  
  can some pleasssssse hlep …. connect@jibran.co.in
Krishna Patel

Hi,

I tried SE on 4 hosting providers. On Dedicated serevers. It is damm slow. You cant create reliable social network with it.

One other thing which no body mentioned. When I install SE, somewhere chinese people came and started posting on my site. I installed 4 times and they are doing same thing. I asked support for this than they needed $50 to give me this simple answer.

I feel that they put bot on my SE.

Please please Dont but this software.
reha

If customization is an important point, Diaspora and Appleseed are most customizable, and better each side made with them can talk to each other.

The negatives of SE are :
- its costliest, unencrypted source and more features available at half the price with phpfox, dzoic, joomla’s joomsocialand boonex
- very limited development and plugins as compared to Elgg, Drupal Commons and WordPress Buddypress – these three are also free as in free beer
- the most important thing is SE does not let users have Friends list or Circles (see plus.google.com) or does not let user Social Apps and gadgets (see Facebook gadgets) Scripts like phpfox does this. And without these any socialnetworking script is just meaningless.

If you must spend money have a look at jomsocial, phpfox, dzoic, boonex OR better still without spending any money initailly try any of these three : Drupal Commons or Buddypress or Elgg.or Appleseed

If you are an advanced user and not afraid with ruby test out Diaspora.
Ernesto

I was about to buy SE.. but now I'm very, very confused!
I really don't know who to trust.(???!!!)
Is SE working or not??? It's frustrating to make this choice :(
And the biggest problem is that I had to buy it for a customer, then customize it and also develop a new plugin that is not listed in the mods&plugins page..
…and I should buy the package in advance at my own risk, as this seems to be the only way to see the code and understand how really difficult is to develop the plugin and customize everything :(((
on the top of it, it seems to be impossible to know the real speed of SE with the demo version..

By the way.. Any other social network software to suggest?
Bye
Rick

Too bad their support is so slow!!!!! I purchased SE a few days ago, and there is a problem with the install script (yes, my server meets all requirements) as it will not work properly. My host has verified it is their script and not the server, but for some reason SE support has not responded to my ticket. I thought buying SE would be a good thing but without support it is worthless. I am considering requesting a full refund!
Mitcodecrusher

To all SE haters and those having issues with the product. First off, SE 4 and SE 3 are very different and must be compared as such. If you are having issues with SE 4 as per performance then it’s probably because you don't know how to optimize with Zend and/or scale up your infrastructure. If you are having problems due to third-party apps then it’s not SE’s fault, which seems to be the biggest complaint at the forums. I agree with Eugene in that most errors come from trying to over feature with plugins and mods.

To the comments that Jay and BusterSiren made, both of you are very wrong in regards to the code. PHP MVC with Zend is not for Noobs and the SE Team is done a great job in developing there app for a wide audience of users (noobs to pros). I am Zend Certified professional and PHP teacher. I have over 20 years as application developer. I stand behind SE as one of the better Social Networking applications. Keep in mind that SE does not have a community of a several hundred thousand developers like Joomla, Dolphin, DotNetNuke, so on; it’s just a couple guys. So for an application that cost less than $500 is awesome. Be glad that you can get so much for so little.

If you think SE sucks then go pay several $Ks for Community server or some other Social Engine.

Alex and the SE Team, keep up the awesome work. I know how tough it is to build apps like this state side.
- hiddenability
  
  I totally agree with this comment. If you put SE on a decent server and keep it simple with the minimum number of mods and apps you need for your site, then you should not have too many problems. In order to not rely too much on support, which could get costly, I think you’ll get most out of SE with some coding knowledge (html, css, sql and basic server admin knowledge), but anyone can read about this stuff online as they go along and learn it. I did! Especially for the cost, SE is a great package.
Adrian

so i have Soc.Netwrk and it is not the best as far as support goes. if you have any questions you better not want them answered the same day. they dont have a phone number to call its all via email which to me is very disturbing. I only have a limited time to get my project done and have to wait for response from thier email team. which takes days.. This way of support sucks..
Lambert Osx

First of all, sorry for my english.

I buyed the license and full plugins suite. And I regret. Money by windows. This app is really slow, and for 0 users online, you need about 10-15 seconds to load every page. I tried all issues till one month with third parties help. IMpossible to solve without a big big server. Then if you want to fast growing up, and have a lot of users, forget this app right now. I'm on Joomla now, and it's just an other world. Harder to learn, sure, but WORKING ! Please read all post… You'll see.

;-)lamb
http://www.socialengine.net/ Alex

This is Alex, one of SocialEngine's founders.

Guys, thanks for the honest reviews. We're sorry to hear that some of you have had negative experiences with SE. Unfortunately, it's quite difficult to satisfy absolutely every person's specific needs when it comes to a white-label platform like SE. We do in fact have a small development team here, so we try very hard to pick out features that are most in demand and focus on those. The result is that some details are missing (like the WYSIWYG editors mentioned by BusterSiren above). We sincerely work hard to keep the code accessible and easy to understand so that details like these can be filled in by developers when they need them. I can assure you that we have never used Dreamweaver, and are actually WYSIWYG-phobic. We use NetBeans. :)

Admittedly, our support staff was not prepared for the unexpectedly overwhelming response to our SE4 release last year. Our new customer volume jumped very abruptly and we scrambled to scale up our support team. At the time BusterSiren and Cape Milo posted above, our resources were spread quite thin and we were struggling to maintain a high quality support service. Thankfully, we've properly scaled up since then and now have an expert team of developers (not just customer service reps), 100% in-house here in Los Angeles, offering high-quality support to our clients. As far as we are aware, none of our direct competitors offer support by the same developers that directly contribute to the source code. We do this so that bugs can be addressed and fixed directly by our support staff.

There are a few important things to keep in mind in evaluating any white-label platform like SocialEngine:

1. White-label platforms (especially SocialEngine) are designed to be customized. Most of our clients do make direct changes to the source code or install third-party mods and add-ons. Our research indicates that these are usually the source of issues that arise. We work very hard to support our own source code and fix bugs as they are reported, but it's more difficult to help when custom alterations have been made.

2. Running any website with interactive features like a SocialEngine-powered site takes considerable resources. If you expect to have even a few dozen concurrent users, you'll need the appropriate server resources to support them. This is why hosting is big business!

In any case, I completely understand the concerns you guys have raised in the comments above. We've already been working on improvements that I think will help address these issues:

1. SE4 is now built on the Zend Framework, a popular open-source framework with lots of documentation and third-party resources available. While the baseline speed might be a bit slower than raw PHP/Smarty, our research indicates that it will scale up much more effectively. It's also highly modular, which will help SE clients make custom changes without interfering with upgrades and support coverage.

2. We've now listed some configuration suggestions for improving speed, such as APC, memcached, bcmath, etc: http://www.socialengine.net/support/documentation…
With these installed, your site will run very quickly and smoothly as you can see in our live demo. Unfortunately, most people that complain about speed issues haven't implemented these suggestions.

3. We've drastically grown our staff to provide better service. Our support response time is much lower than it was last year, and we now have extremely skilled, bright people on staff. We have people here dedicated to addressing bugs, and we now roll out monthly releases to get them fixed sooner. We plan on increasing this frequency to weekly builds in the near future.

The main point I'd like to make is this: We're not perfect, but we are listening. Our mission is to help people build truly unique social communities, and we think our software is a great tool for doing just that.

I'll be glad to answer any other questions/complaints you guys have!
- Nick
  
  Hi Alex,
  Glad you posted. I actually really like your SE4, but my problem again is your support staff. They are quick to pass the buck with short responses that dont get you anywhere. After a few months I had a bug with the themes just disappearing. I spent the $50 bucks to extend support only to get a response from a deusche name richard writing he doesnt deal with customizations. I explained, I am getting 3 different errors on my error log and was then wondering if he could help explain where the issue might be… to which I got another response saying “We dont deal with customizations”.
  
  So here’s my dilemma, if you have a support team dedicated to the customers, how come you have to pay $50 bucks for them to tell you error logs are a customization they cant handle. If you really want to help with support, post what the error codes mean and where to look to solve the problem. Then you will have better rapport with the buyers. There also needs to be a clause in your extended support because it is not support, it is just giving the company $50.
  - chris
    
    WELL I DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT $50 OPTION SUPPORT AT ALL
    SINCE THEY DON’T REALLY SUPPORT NOR MOD IT.
    
    I NEVER PAID THAT. WAS NOT ABOUT TO PAY FOR THEM ONLY TO TELL ME TO CONTACT LAST PERSON WHO WORKED ON IT. I CAN FIGURE THAT OUT WITHOUT PAYING SOMEONE $600 A YEAR.
    IT SHOULD BE ILLEGAL TO DO THAT.
    
    SO … IT MAKES NO SENSE AT ALL
- http://www.mydatery.com paul
  
  Alex as of October 21 2011 I can confirm that your support is next to useless!
  Waiting 2 days per answer to fix bugs or problems in your software is just not on! You release new things that inhibit what is already there! I will very probably be seeking a refund because of your terrible support!
stacy

I have installed this software on my shared network and it is easily customizable. In the past, we have used the .NET based Akeni Social Network software and we found that using PHP, the performance of the web site is not as good compared to the .NET social network software. But with PHP, it is much easier to customize
Jay

loverboydell last comment is a load of crap… hes promoting his forum.. and they are not helpful at all, that forum has a lot of people asking for help, with a bunch of idiots replying in the most childish way. They dont help.. trust me on this.

I agree with BusterSiren, the coding behind this is really really bad… I can't understand how these guys have got the balls to release this software in such bad condition. Their programmers are noobs.. I looked at tit at first and thought yep it looks good, but then I noticed many bugs and it was so slow to do simple things. I thought ok well I have built similar site to social networks in the past so I know it shouldn't be so slow.

I then checked out the database structure and the programming behind SE4…. WOW OMG !!! what the hell are these guys doing…. boy oh boy… I couldn't believe my eyes. And the templates using tpl lol please don't get me started… guys trust me on this one… these guys are kids hoping to make a quick buck and run, thats why they haven't invested in more staff and is why they didn't fix SE3. The reason they didn't fix SE3 was because they don't know how, lol a lot of their code is done using dreamweaver lol yep check it out.

from what i have seen with all the scripts out there is not good. Dolphin is quite good but then the security is really bad, I remember getting hacked so many times when using dolphin… so don't bother guys..

I would say hire a good php programmer who has experience with seo and ajax. "not dreamweaver designers" they don't really know php and use plugins to try to create complex sites which means later on it will break and they don't have the skills to fix it.

My view is the time you spend trying to learn these social network scripts and fix them, you could actually learn to programme php, javascript, mysql. Buy the books guys and take your time, you will see it's not hard at all, it's simple logic.
loverboydell

i have tried it, se3.20 and i find it very nice, if you dont know programming, but there is place to find help and the place that assisted me was socialengineforum.com
i am certain that whatever problem you are having with social engine that someone else has the same problem, so after buying or trying social engine, their are some great programmers at the forum to help you…..
Cape Milo

I agree with buster siren. I'm getting very frustrated with SE customer service. It seems very slow and un-helpful when you have problems. Anyway, can someone kindly recommend a better social network script? I have a few thousands of members on SE and would need to migrate them to the new script. I'm just a little concerned I may start to have problems with SE and maybe now is a good time tio jump ship!
BusterSiren

Are you kidding me!? Have any of you even used this shoddy software. It is the most shoddy package I've ever seen any company ever put out. I am stunned that they put this out as a final version. SE3 was awful, and SE4 while it looks better is every bit as awful.

There are so many bugs in this it's not even funny. It looks great on the surface but just wait until you get into using it.

First, none of the editors work properly. And they're all different! There is no consistency. On the forums, to reply you just get a small empty box! No editing tools or anything. Unless you click on QUOTE. But who wants to always QUOTE when they reply to a forum. In the blogs, you get an entirely different editor, with its own set of problems… like it doesn't parse URLs properly. It ADDS stray characters to the end of URLs! Then when people click on them they get page not found!

This is without a doubt the most poorly put together platform I've ever seen. And they've done it in a very tricky way. It looks great on the surface. But once you get into it there are thousands of problems!

Oh and their support is awful. I mean it's good when you can get it – but you can never get it. You pay the support fee and have maybe 10 tickets to start with (due to the fact there are so many bugs in the software), and they get to an average of one ticket every other day. I've been sitting here for a month now and I've gotten about 10% of the problems resolved! 90% still sitting there waiting for answers that may come in four days or may come in four weeks. Who knows?

Anyway, good luck if you try this. But just be ware of the thousands of bugs and glitches you'll find once you really get into it. Like, emails sent to users notifying them of responses that are so filled with stray characters like & n b s p – as to make them unreadable. And they'll certainly make YOUR company look LIKE IDIOTS!
- chris
  
  I INVESTED ALOT AND EVERY ONE IS RIGHT..
  ITS A BIG MONEY PIT
  RUNS SLOW WITH FEW ON IT
  AND EXCEPT FOR ONE PLUG IN, NONE OF THEM LOOKED IKE WHAT IS EVERY ORDERED WITHOUT more MONEY PUT INTO IT.
  THEY MAKE IT VERY HARD SO THAT OWNER UNLESS VERY PROGRAM SAVY CAN DO ANYTHING AT ALL TO IT.
  WAS NOT A GOOD INVESTMENT AT ALL……..
  :(
  YOU ARE SO RIGHT
http://www.TopcommunitySoftware.com JoeOFarrel

With all these social networking software scripts around, its gets tough picking the right one. I decided to toss them all onto one big user review site where users can really say what they think about the software, all in one place, helping us all out! If anyone has an objective user review on socialengine, please post it'
http://webhive.com.ua Eugene

In general SosialEngine is one of the best products we have worked with. Most of code is clear and structured.

However often I see people make mistakes trying to build a second facebook. Eventually a lot of people install all plugins they found to be "cool": blog, chat, groups, forum, video, music, gallery and so on. With addition of a bunch of mods to expend the functionality. The main problem here is that in this case you will require good hosting from the very beginning.

There is another hidden issue here – attention of your users will be spread around the features. People won't know what to start from and most likely some of plugins functionality won't be used at all (but will eat server resources).

Let me show you an example. You are starting a niche community for "art house movie" lover. In this case you can install SE, add plugins like groups (for discussions) and blogs (for movie reviews). Also few mods to improve usability. As an option you can add video plugin to keep movie trailers, but only in case your budget allows good hosting. In addition you can order to build a custom plugin "movies" that will allow admin to add movies and users to rate them.

More than enough for a start. All these functionality won't cost much (~1500-2000usd with design). And you can actually start to work on getting community members (and trying to keep them involved), instead of adding any extra functionality. Your hosting payments won't be high.

You need to pay attention to what makes your social network different and listen to your users. It's much better to enhance your specific functionality instead of general. For example it will make sense to order a custom recommendation system based on users votes.

Just don't try to be a second facebook or myspace. You can always beat any large network in a smaller niche.
- MCR
  
  I’ll say only that. Try develop that! Messy code ever seen in my 15 years of programming! The handbrake is when I debug that thing and in $application bootstrap section, memory starts from 30MB per request … what the ..! Thinking about 1000 per second, 2000 maybe, lol, BANG!
  
  … “The servers, the servers are on fire, we don’t need no watter let the motherboards burn!”
http://www.wrestleconnect.com Anthony Gundacker

Fair Review..

Except one should not overlook that the plugins listed do not come with the 250 dollar license..

It's a pay as you go type deal.. Paying individually for the plugins..

I've enjoyed it, and can't wait for Version 4.. But I've literally invested about a grand into the license/software/plugins..

It's slow at times.. and is probably not worth the investment with some other cheaper and free alternatives..

But it's great for those with little webdesign/developing knowledge.
http://www.socialenginebase.net Jay

Jaco that link is not online.
Aaron

SocialEngine's fluidity depends on the kind of plugins you're managing. I've had an easier time dealing with RadCodes plugins. Please, please be sure that the plugins you're purchasing are compatible with the version you're using.

The Smarty engine is very unforgiving if you upload a SE 2 plugin for your SE 3 script.
http://www.studentvillage.co.za Jaco

The trick to socialengine is MEMCACHE.

We run Social Engine 3 with 80 000 users, some days more than 300 people online at one time.

(www.studentvillage.co.za)

We use 1 DB server & 3 other servers (although we only need 1).

The 3 other servers are used for web servers (load balanced) and they also serve as MEMCACHE servers – 1 GB memcache each.

Our DB server load average is 1 (and it's a quad core, so it's basically doing nothing) and the web servers are at 0.1.

See our live loads at http://server.svo.co.za/load/ (firefox only)
http://www.socialenginebase.net Jay

Previous user was correct that there is truly a problem with how socialengine works with database. MySQL overloads with any amount of significant users.

http://www.socialenginebase.net/viewtopic.php?f=1…
http://webhive.com.ua Eugene

How many plugins and mods did you have installed? Also it really depends on quality of customization.

I've seen websites based on SE with 10K users running smoothly. Also I've seen websites with all possible plugins included running slow as hell with almost no users at all.
http://www.nakikita.com James Edwards

I have been looking for a stable community software package, that is scalable which is to say that it can handle the user load. I came to this review to find the truth, then I read Korhan's comment about how SE performs in the real world. I came to this REVIEW to find the truth. Obviously this review isnt worth much except to tell you how easy it installs and how much you can expect to spend for some plugins. Between the Russians at ABK, Dolphin, and other Russian/Khazikstan software lies I dont know where to turn to find something thats worth my time and effort. If anyone can help me with this, please email me: jimsmaildrop@hotmail.com

Thx
http://www.socialenginesucks.com Korhan

I had the worst experience with SE! The script is no good when you have few thousand members and only 150 members online. I spent over 500 (2 dedicated servers, one for sql) USD for hosting (per month) and it did not help. The coding is just very bad! Don't buy it if you think you will have over 3.000 members.
- Nick Parkin nick@mas
  
  I agree, SocialEngine is no good. I purchased it and paid them to install it as well. I tested it with just three members, it was slow to load and took for ever to login to the user account. I used their recommend host Arvixe who were just as bad. I have asked for a refund, no reply so far. It looks like I will have to take legal action to recover my money.
  - Kenneth Sumerford
    
    I have read several bad reviews for SocialEngine from 2009 through Feb. 2011. I downloaded it in Nov. 2011 and it is Not well-documented internally. The company gives no response for the trial version. I will continue to read reviews and check their code.
    Their videos are hard to follow and their docs seem incomplete.
    — Kenneth
    - Ryan
      
      Being a long time code developer. Social Engine 3 & 4 are good software.
      
      All scripts have their issues and good points. I have studied and worked with social engine 3 since it has been brought to the public. It runs fine, is expandable and has unique features which mke it stand out. Sure there is cons about social engine but easily fixed and made into a great software.
      
      Far as social engine 4 goes. Thats a whole different story.
      
      If you go social engine , go with 3 and yes they still offer it.
      
      Think of software like buying a new car. So people love it, some people hate it. But you never truly get the feel for it unless you try it for yourself.
      - http://www.feeligo.com Diane
        
        Now that a year has passed, what are your thoughts on SE4 now? Have you checked out SE Cloud?
- chris
  
  i totally agree.
  they made it so its a big money pit as well!
  - Roza
    
    I would be also curious to find out if your views changed by 2013 on SE?

SocialEngine Review – Is it Good Enough for your Social Network?

Mike Johnston

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SocialEngine Review – Is it Good Enough for your Social Network?

Mike Johnston

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