Best Forum Software?

Vbulletin rocks! because it has endless features with enough security & easiness of necassary plugins

 

And very questionable ethics & motives behind their new Google Ads feature.

 

vBulletin, vBulletin, vBulletin. Seriously, it is great and all, but its everywhere!

The new Invision Power Board will be out soon (yay!) and i can't wait. I'd hold off purchasing a license until the new IPB is out so you can compare.

 

all these things cost money , I dont't want to spend money on license untill I start making some from the site.

anyhting as good as vB in the opensource region?

 

Vbulletin is good... but is not easy to find a host for that, esp. in shared hosting environment. Guess what and why ? you know the answer

SMF is a new born star

 

Invision Power Board. It has a very modern default, great support, tons of features, good skinners, user friendly, layered back end, thoughtful developers, and solid official add ons.

 

you all make some great points, but I am still on the fence, I have no idea where to go as far as these forum softwares go!

 

for the basic forum one should go for Fluxbb or AEF

 

no, I dont know the answer. why?

 

Yup.. I too think.. VBulletin is the best out there!.. most of the forums use VBulletin for their forums..

 

just a classical problems, such CPU resources and you'll see this annoying message from VB itself "data base error "

 

phpbb is awesom

 

What does that have to do with anything?

 

phpBB works well. fast for users to find things, browse threads. updates etc. thats the main things

 

ive been looking for an excellent free forum software and from my research Mybb is the best - you folks whove never tried it may beg to differ but open source rocks

 

So vBulletin wins on a majority rule?

 

Alot prefer Invision Power boad . but the best one is Vbulletin . best security

 

SMF is probably the best free solution for a large forum, however it is not open source and is still a bit rough around the edges compared to VB - though 2.0 is quite a bit 'less rough'.

MyBB is open source and a far superior platform to phpBB for larger forums, however it is not quite as mature as SMF, IPB or vB are. (My definition of mature being - having a majority of the power and flexibility of its competitors. MyBB has a lot of its own improvements, however).

If you want something 'different', I would suggest either Drupal or Vanilla.

PunBB is an interesting toy, but unfortunately its vaunted speed edge vanishes as you add features, which is not the case for solutions like SMF, phpBB, MyBB, etc.

If you have a Wordpress blog, an obvious solution for sticking a forum to it is BBPress, though it is both slow and comparatively featureless.

 

I have a question here !

From all my researches, vB seems to be way in advanced in terms of recommendations.
But it's not free.
So my questions are :
A - Does everything you will add to it (plugins, addons, templates, etc) will cost you money too ?
B - Do you pay one time only for your life or you pay again for annual or for upgrades, etc. ?
...I am running a phpBB 2.x forum since 4 years. It's ok, it's free, but sometime painful to tweek it. So...
C - Do you know if it is easier and faster for vBulletin to : install / modify template / add plug-ins like photo gallery for users....... ... compare to same situation with phpBB ?

For me, they mostly all look the same, same structure, same profiles, same navigation.... Nothing suuuuper diferent between the major ones. (in visible aspect)

 

my favorite is woltlab burning board.
its not popular but its the best, i have tried every major forum script and i know what im talking about