What is the best forum software around. Criteria would be cost, management effort, easiness of handling by administrators, feature for use, easiness to handle for users, SEO and the like. This forum is using vBulletin - What are the advantages? And how would someone go about to set something like this up (requirements)?
It depends when you say the best forum software, basically there are forums which target SE friendliness (I mean forum platforms, based on SE friendliness), whilst there are other aiming for powerful, better features. There are both free and paid forum platforums out there, and some I've used in my past are phpBB, IPB, SMF, myBB and vB. I am a vB user today, and I am very satisfied with their forum platform, mainly as it helps me to avoid much modding, it has a very powerful adminCP and best of all, it has top support. Comes with lots of vB modifications & styles available at vBulletin.org. I recommend vB, if you do not wish to customize your forum much, as it mainly offers you all the basic features (and more...) you need to start a community, though it may be a little pricey for some. I would recommend phpBB for a free platform, mainly due to the large modifications / styles database, with fairly good support at their support forums, one of the most widely used forum platforms meaning you may have issues with spammers, hackers and so on, as they like to target the largest platforms. phpBB2 requires a good bit of modding, whilst phpBB3 comes with all the basic features and a few other features that a community needs. If you on the other hand aren't good at modding and so on, you may want to try other platforums (such as myBB, SMF etc...) Regards, Meti