I'm starting a forum sometime soon -- what tools to use? PHPBB2 seems to be pretty good, but is there anything better? PHPBB2 seems not to be optimized for a deep-crawl by google OOTB, though I have read there are tweaks you can do to get this working. Also, PHPBB2 does not allow users to attach documents with their posts. This is a feature I would like, seems like it could come in handy. Instant messaging would be nice too, maybe something open source... something in jabber?? Anyone got a favorite forum tool, prefferably free, preferrably php? (Don't want to learn perl.) (On second thought, if it's perl and it's really really good, I'd have a look at it.) What do these digitalpoint forums use? Digitalpoint guys, are you overall happy with the forums or do you have a wish list, things that annoy you, fix would be nice? Best regards, Thomas.
We use vBulletin 3.0. It's not free, but in my opinion it's infinitely better than phpBB (I've run phpBB before, so I'm very familiar with it). I have no complaints at all about vB3. - Shawn
I agree. This seems to be a great piece of forum software. The only feature I would like to see added is a spell checker.
What's *really* niec about vB3 is the back-end/administration. You can do some amazing stuff with it, so it's really nice for a programmer like me. I didn't think phpBB had a bad back-end until I saw the vB3 backend. It's a programmers dream. - Shawn
years ago i used the discus board pro version - disaster in code created - the worse html i ever saw on the net - that was until some 2 years ago .. then i switched to http://netbula.com/anyboard/ free version I installed it with their installer once and another times by hand/telnet myself and i was happy with tgeh board - many features, poll, chat, e-cards, FULL display flexibility many frames possible ( news, top 10, hot links, ... etc ) clean html links and pages produced full control on head section with meta tags and footer section plus many areas available to insert additional code - banners, etc google and other SE liked it and crawled it - i think they got every page ( slurp still searches for it months after it has been removed .. and gives 404 --> all files/posts are in ONE single folder .. easy to find ONE index page with direct links to each page however - all file names numbered - no real names
way to bump a 7 year old thread, nice work "forum tools" have evolved a bit since 2004 when this thread was started.