phpbb : it has a mods to perform seo, but i dont remember the links, search somewhere. vbulletin : you pay for it, of course it is good, if it sucks, would you pay for it??
Uhh... no... I wouldn't pay for it if it sucked! I use it on my forum and find it comes with a lot of goodies already installed. There are also TONS of hacks to be added for your member's enjoyment. Lyte
I prefer Invision Board, and agree with the fact of lazy websmasters not upgrading phpBB In addition, if your hosting is running Cpanel, you can see outside your root directory the fix for "GOD" user, major cause of all phpBB hacked sites.
i would prefer vbulletin, have used for 2 forums i own 2 lisense copies , and im happy with it , more over it gives everything a user wants, after all you want members to your community as long as they are happy you win, i myself prefer to join communities which are vbulletin boards. prefer vbulletin thats what my opinion is.
Well, I just started a fresh board with phpBB3 and can say that I DO like the new set-up, but would like some features that are important to me right now, and don't cherish the idea of waiting for the mods to begin anew. The most basic of which is RSS/XML functionality- both incoming and outgoing. The fastest and easiest way to create content on a website is to use RSS to automatically insert feeds into posts! As well, its common sense that anybody that has a computer these days uses feeders of some kind for their news.
Phpbb 3 is a lot better than phpbb 2x. I installed a test forum in mine. It comes with a lot of vb features like better pms, reporting, individual permissions, (best off, subforums without the need of the big huge mod). There are cople other features that make me actually want to wait for the release. And, as far as the mods go, with the new version well atleast a lot of mods have been integrated into it, so that makes life a lot easier!
You can find it at phpbb.com I haven't quite figured it out yet for version 3. For phpBB2, the hack was titled "FIND". Forum Integrated News Delivery An awesome tool to liven up any slow board.
Newer versions of any board should have RSS/XML functionality IMHO. Anyone with a blog knows the internet world revolves around this.
No problem. Let me know when you get it up in a live environment. IMO, the best mod to ever come along. A great way to use it is to create various usernames for the feeds to use on various topics.
Here is what I can tell you about vBulletin. I have bought several forums. 2 were PHPbb, another was an IPB. I immediately converted each to vBulletin when I bought the forum. Did a little SEO work, (by hand, not using the vbseo script) and immediately saw a positive and considerable difference in the ranking and indexing. All three forums have grown substantially since I purchased them. A big part of that is because vBulletin is easily spiderable. Another reason is that many of the big forums are on vBulletin, and that tells me something. You dont see too many large forums on PHPbb or IPB. It happens im sure, but I dont seem to run across them. I run across plenty of 40k + member vBulletin forums though. I also dont find too many PHPbb or IPB forums in the SERPS. plenty of vBulletin though. I say you should go with the proven winner.
I just set up my first vbulletin forum. I will be moving my phpbb forums as soon as I am capable. It is not even really a contest. Vbulletin has been a snap, and making things happen with it is just 100x easier and less taxing than in PHPBB.
Not saying that phpBB is better, but it can certainly handle the traffic if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty with the code.
Yeah but if you look at the top forums, that is the only phpbb site, and there are 5 or 6 vbulletin sites in the top list, more than any of the non-custom builds on there.
vBulletin without a question. We've tried most all of the community scripts and the only one that I would even consider outside of vB is Invision, but that would only be if vB disappeared, which it won't. vB 3.6 Gold will be here shortly and the new feature set for 3.6 is very impressive - not that the previous versions have not been. IMO, there is no other community software company that supports it software as well as vB does. If there is an exploit or a problem it is addressed very quickly. They have been the innovator in forum software as well for a very long time with new features being added to the core software. I know some see benefits in other scripts from SMF, IPB, phpBB, etc, but for my Big-Boards, I won't settle for anything else, and we definitely did and continue to compare them. I'm not brand loyal.. I just want the best there is, and if that changes, we may migrate over.. Fortunately, in the last 5 years, we have not seen reason to do it.
I used phpbb2 for 4 years, and just got annoyed and tired of the updates every 3 weeks. and if we didn't upgrade we would be hacks, so I wasn't a "lazy" webmaster.. but all the time consumed with the upgrade, I rarely had time to enjoy the forum and ended up selling it just to free up some time. after that I started another site and tried a nulled version of IPB, and I didn't really care for it, so then I tried a nulled version of vb and loved it.. shortly after I bought a leased vb, and a year later I have an owned copy I also have a client with 2 vb sites, and I spend less time working on all three of these forums then I use to on one phpbb2 site. I've checked out phpbb3.0 and its nice but still don't compare to a paid script, ipb or vb.. so I have picked vb well over phpbb
Well, I have thought about buying VB but i didnt. Well, phpBB is free and dont expect much on a free software. If the phpBB devs dump the project, you can do NOTHING about it. People who uses phpBB should be thankful that there's a free forum software that they can use. As for other forum softwares, they have A LOT OF EXPLOITS than phpBB, but hackers dont like to waste their time. phpBB is dominating the free forum software market. Thats why hackers like to mess with phpBB. Example, so many hackers exploit Windows OS'es because ALMOST everyone uses Windows. So its not fair to say that phpBB cause a lot of troubles. Blame the hackers! If hackers dont exist...there would be NO exploits to be exploited!