From the poll it can be seen that vBulletin remains at the top and most popular. There is reason to believe that it is the most preferable too.
I don't know of any serious forum administrator that has a problem with spammers. Automated spammers can be blocked out with simple human verification. I've even written up comprehensive steps to locking out repeat human spammers. As someone who owns a vBulletin big board (v3.8.5) with no intention to upgrade to vB4.x in the near future, let me point out that vBulletin is still running off of its earlier heyday when it was the biggest fish in the forum software pond. vBulletin 3.x has the biggest penetration of the premium softwares and most big boards use it to the point of convention. That momentum isn't going to die overnight no matter how bad any current vBulletin version is. The vast majority of even large vBulletin forums are using an older version than even v3.8.5. But times have changed, vBulletin was sucked up by a branding machine literally named "Internet Brands" and many top tier vB devs have jumped ship. There's concern among big board owners about vB's future and rightfully so. I'm about to start a new forum and am currently playing with IPB. Invision actually uses their CMS for their website as an excellent live demo of an enterprise level company utilizing IP.Content. Can't say the same for vBulletin. I was initially reluctant with starting on a fresh platform, but there's no harm in learning something new. But 10 minutes into the IPB demo's administrative panel and it's evident how behind the times vB is.
Well, that intelligence as well is like saying Internet Explorer is the best web browser becuase it contains maybe 55% of the market.
Vbulletin is world-wide forums leader due to immense unique technology in forums industry from so long.. The best feature of Vbulletin is plugin VbSEO it works superb for indexing each page of your forums
vBulletin is like Kodak. It made the best product some time ago but things changed and the people who made it are no longer there. The current product vbulletin 4 should not be confused with vBulletin 3 which, for years after it was developed, was clearly the forum leader. If you go to the vBulletin 4 forums it's rather disappointing. Unless you know your way around the back end, it seems to promise some trouble. But that's not the worst of it. So much is unintuitive and confusing. Search isn't good at all. Unless you know your way around vB 4, it's not easy. But some people like the layout of the back end better and some other items which from vb 3 are still better, imho. Also there are all those plugins and add ons... Invision Power Board - I've recently reviewed it and bought several copies. As many others have mentioned here, development is light years ahead of vbulletin. while those guys are still messing around with thousands of bugs, Invision already has a very slick iPhone skin and app for their forums, facebook and twitter integration and much more. It's so good for what it is I'd consider moving my stuff there.
I found this while doing a search for links between duplicate accounts. I reckon dp's owner (Shawn Hogan) is "serious" but we certainly have a problem with spammers. Without the vigilance of the mod team and the automated and manual tools that are available spam would be much more noticeable here. So, this can be the exception to your rule.
Digital Point got better. I remember getting PMs from here very often and every time it would be for that I got a PM saying I got spam. Either way, I've actually NEVER gotten any spam messages on an IPB forum now that they've implemented the Spam Service feature.
I heard that vBulletin get so many spams and others stuff Is it true. One more thing friends do we have to renew every year. Then it get costly i guess for me
You, if you want the updates (which you really do need). The cost isn't significant and if your community is even vaguely successful you should be able to cover the cost with advertising. If your concept isn't good should you be putting your time into it anyway?
They went from $30 for a year of upgrades and support to $175 to upgrade to the next version, and every major version now comes out rushed. No code re-write, just a few more things to add bloat to your software. I'd rather get a XenForo. That thing has less than five images in its design, and its speed has been significantly better than any vBulletin or IPB forum. Besides, Kier and Mike really know what they're doing, hence XenForo won't go gold in 2010.
I would recommend using IP.Board, vBulletin is the most used, but IPB has a more 'Web 2.0' look and feel to it. IPB also has some very good plugins, and almost all the features of vB.
The community for my site was rolled out using IPB. I had previously used Vbulletin in other sites but found that the back end of IPB is much easier to navigate and as mentioned before the interface seems more modern and usable. With that being said I am so used to VB that I still find myself a bit lost at times with my board but do appreciate and am beginning to prefer the IPB interface over the VB.