I personally wouldn't use Phpbb anyway, completely messed up my forum after 6000 registered users - mainly to do with cookie problems. I upgraded to Invasion (paid version) and think it's the biggest waste of money! I thought paying would help me in the support forums, but the Invasion team are not interested in helping out one bit! Vbulletin may be ok, DP seems to be using it well...
Just as a side note, If you aren't looking for something as beefy as VB or PHPBB, then miniBB is certianly worth a look... Really good bit of kit for a small-medium sized forum. Also the support is awesome.
I have administered forums running phpBB, Invision and vBulletin. Actually my main site went from phpBB > Invision > vB which is where it will be staying. Support for phpBB I found quite good although many missing options in the admin control panel and many features you want to have in a forum although it's free what more could you ask for? Invision looks nice but support and mods I found were fairly disappointing especially the support which I found to be the worst by far. Since moving to vBulletin I haven't looked back, it's a fantastic board, easy to use admin panel, user friendly and the support is simple awesome with the longest support ticket I've had to wait for was around 20 minutes. Quite simply vBulletin is the best ever money I've spent on my web site without a doubt.
i've asked this question in this forum before but didn't get a response so i'll try my luck here... is there a free version of the invision power board forum software? if so, what's the difference between the free and paid versions?
Speaking of no mySQL or database. There is also Lite Boards. They are free open source and use .txt files as a database. *Yes I know this thread is old but it wasn't me that revived it
I believe Invision have gone commercial like vB nowadays. You might find an old version of 1.2 or 1.3 floating around but a fair few security patches etc would have been released in that time I would have thought so free isn't really the best option.
i agree and everyone else says so too... but i guess one needs to keep in mind that vbulletin costs $$$ while phpbb is free. that should counts for something
This goes back to Joey's plain and simple remark...It isn't quite plain and simple as people have different requirements. There are instances where you may not need all the bells and whistles or where you don't want to use a database (as in the two examples of forums given earlier) I do think though that after reading through this thread, the future forum owner would at least be educated on what those differences are.
Sure it does. There are occasions where vb doesnt make sense... But all things being equal, vBulletin is the way to go.
If you are hosted on Windows with SQL server there is also: http://www.communityserver.org/ It seems pretty good but I have not run it myself.