Forum software

I am trying to decide what forum software is better: PHPbb or Vbulletin. PHPbb is free and Vbulletin is $195, but last time I used PHPbb there was so much spam so fast I had to take the forum down. Is Vbulletin any better? Which would you pick? Thanks!

 

You're going to get several opinions here, I would go with vBulletin but that's not to say a nice forum can't be ran on free software.
Might look into SMF or MyBB if you don't really want to go with phpBB

 

There is also XenForo forum software.

 

Thanks for the replys. I will end up using either phpbb or vbulletin. I just dont want to spend 195 for vbulletin if its not any better than phpbb. I like vbulletin becuase it is also easy to customize the template, more so than phpbb. How is vbulletin with spam? I couldnt stop the spam on phpbb, it just kept coming, by the time I took down the forum it was getting hundreds of spam posts a day, I couldnt even keep up with it. Whats crazy is that I would block the IP address of the spammer in the phpbb admin area but they could still post and spam, whatss up with that??? I will most likely go with vbulletin on my next forum, but just want to make sure I am not going to spend 195 for something that is the same as phpbb.

 

Also I have been searching and searching but cant seem to find a vbulletin login bridge. I have found one for 3.7 version but not current 4.0 version. Does anyone know where I could get a login bridge for vbulletin. I have found several for phpbb.

 

What sort of bridge?
You can always have it custom coded

 

I will need a bridge for the login system from my current site to work with the vbulletin login. This way when my users login to my site they wont have to login to the forum as well (login twice). From the research I have done, it seems the way to do this is to intergrate the vbulletin login with my site as opposed to making my login work with vbulletin. This way upgrades wont be a mess. I could get it custom done, but would rather use an exsiting system or mod if its out there. I have found a bridge for version 3.7, and looking in the vbulletin forums I see many people need the same thing. I just cant seem to find a 4.0.x bridge. That almost kills the deal for me on vbulletin, as I need this feature.

 

I would go with vBulletin. They might be expensive but it's worth it. There's way more flexibility with the software and if you run into problems there's more support.

 

I am just going to go ahead and try Vbulletin and see if this works:
http://code.google.com/p/vbulletin-bridge/
If it doesnt I will look at login.php and login_functions.php to try and write a script that will work. If I dont succeed I will have to get a php guy to write one for me, hopefully it wont cost a ton!

 

xenforo.com

 

I prefer Vbulletin to phpbb, because I think Vbulletin is safer than phpbb, besides, Vbulletin is friendly for SEO.

 

I actually don't understand why you wouldn't look over MyBB, SMF, etc. I can tell you by experience that I've done really well in the search engines with MyBB, and all I did was install Google SEO (has sitemap, meta, FURL, etc.) and did some template edits to add some h1, h2, etc. Plus it's a much easier forum to manage in both modification installation (especially compared to phpBB) and its Admin CP (vBulletin).

Security isn't really an issue. Everyone except SMF gets security audits now, so for the most part, they're pretty much good. The only large-scale vulnerability in the last little while was the 3.8.6 "database" scare that made BBC news.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-10714192

 

I prefer invision forum myself