Good Forum Tools?

[tphyahoo]

I'm starting a forum sometime soon -- what tools to use?

PHPBB2 seems to be pretty good, but is there anything better? PHPBB2 seems not to be optimized for a deep-crawl by google OOTB, though I have read there are tweaks you can do to get this working. Also, PHPBB2 does not allow users to attach documents with their posts. This is a feature I would like, seems like it could come in handy. Instant messaging would be nice too, maybe something open source... something in jabber??

Anyone got a favorite forum tool, prefferably free, preferrably php? (Don't want to learn perl.) (On second thought, if it's perl and it's really really good, I'd have a look at it.)

What do these digitalpoint forums use? Digitalpoint guys, are you overall happy with the forums or do you have a wish list, things that annoy you, fix would be nice?

Best regards,

Thomas.

[digitalpoint]

We use vBulletin 3.0. It's not free, but in my opinion it's infinitely better than phpBB (I've run phpBB before, so I'm very familiar with it).

I have no complaints at all about vB3.

- Shawn

[compar]

I agree. This seems to be a great piece of forum software.

The only feature I would like to see added is a spell checker.

[digitalpoint]

What's *really* niec about vB3 is the back-end/administration. You can do some amazing stuff with it, so it's really nice for a programmer like me. :) I didn't think phpBB had a bad back-end until I saw the vB3 backend. It's a programmers dream. :)

- Shawn

[hans]

years ago i used the discus board pro version - disaster in code created - the worse html i ever saw on the net - that was until some 2 years ago ..

then i switched to
http://netbula.com/anyboard/

free version

I installed it with their installer once and another times by hand/telnet myself and i was happy with tgeh board - many features, poll, chat, e-cards, FULL display flexibility
many frames possible ( news, top 10, hot links, ... etc ) clean html links and pages produced
full control on head section with meta tags and footer section
plus many areas available to insert additional code - banners, etc

google and other SE liked it and crawled it - i think they got every page ( slurp still searches for it months after it has been removed .. and gives 404

--> all files/posts are in ONE single folder .. easy to find ONE index page with direct links to each page
however - all file names numbered - no real names