If You're Looking for Intuitive, This is Not It.
Submitted Aug. 26, 2014
We launched Netforum in 2007 with a membership base of about 1200 with simple membership types. At the time, it worked for us. Since that time, our membership has grown to 18,000 and at the same time Netforum has seemingly spent all their efforts developing new functionality without any attention to usability, the user interface, or aesthetics. The system is not intuitive, simple functions require multiple clicks through several screens, and in many cases, features don't work (often for months at a time) or don't function they way you would expect. Many pre-built queries seems to have glitches that return erroneous results and more often than not, customer service can't identify the glitch. We have had to develop a number of work-arounds in Netforum to accommodate our membership structure. Netforum is regularly slow during peak operating hours (so much so that we've often resorted to doing data entry in our off hours). If you're membership base is small and very simple and straightforward, Netforum could work for you. If you have multiple membership levels, or if your association provides multiple memberships (for example, a section membership with association membership), I would not recommend Netforum as this causes a host of issues. If you do data imports, there are also numerous challenges in Netforum such as the fact that it does not ID potential duplicates upon import, the import process freezes, and you are limited to how many records you can import at one time (though you have to figure this out on your own), and it's glitchy.