What type of Forums to go with?

I am wanting to create a forum for one of my websites. I want to have it setup to where people can donate money, and be able to have more privileges around the forum such as a special download section, etc. There are so many kinds of forums so I am a little confused. What is the best way to go about doing this?

 

My recommendation is to go with a popular forum such as phpBB or vBulletin. You will likely be able to find more modules that you can use for these forums than if you went with a smaller scaled one.

 

^^I concur.

 

if you can afford the price i would go with vbulletin

 

Vbulletin is the best. the licence is only 80 bucks a year

 

Thanks everyone for their input. I have been browsing the vbulletin site, and am impressed with what they are providing. How is the install process? Easy enough?..or brutal?

 

vbullitin is easy to install.

My mate who has no experience with hosts and things of this matter done it easily enough. I'm sure you can

 

vBulletin is a prof. choice, but isnt free. SMF can be an option, its free, easy to install/manage. I manage one SMF about 1 year an everything working fine

 

i'm allright with IPB (invision power board)

 

I used both phpbb and smf and i like smf a lot but i like the admin layout more for phpbb, easier in my opinion

 

vBulletin is your best choice. It is paid but well worth it.

 

I am going to go with vbulleting due to the vast amount of mods I have come across for it. What would be a good mod for vbulletin to have a club members access kind of deal?

 

Vbulletin is the best paid forum software on the planet hands down.

 

That is an opinion and not a fact.

 

....then can you suggest something then?

 

Go with vBulletin and definetely buy the owned version.

Feel free to check out my blog:

ChrisGuthrie.net

For some tips on improving your forum. Either way, vBulletin can do all the things you're looking to do and more. They also have a really active community at vBulletin.org for various plugins to help enhance the community.

 

Vbulletin is good and people here are correct in that it seems to be the best of the paid softwares... Therin lies the shortcoming.

If on a budget SMF is just as good if not better in some areas (skinning comes to mind) and seems to be the leanest of the forum softwares when it comes to resource consumption on the servers.

http://www.simplemachines.org/

I highly recommend SMF.

I do say avoid that steaming pile of crap known as phpBB like the plague. Security holes big enough to float the USS IOWA through, skinning capabilites next to nonexistant, a raging hardon for inaccessable font sizes hard coded into the source, and the need to mod it out the yazoo nuetering your upgrade path just to get the most basic of functionality... phpBB is a total /FAIL/ top to bottom - I cannot understand why ANYONE actually chooses it... I'd sooner see someone using one of the old perl based systems like YaBB than phpBB.

 

try IPB (Invision Power Board) it's easy to install, modify and easy to update.

 

I have 2... its either phpbb or vbulletin.

phpbb is easy to use, and easy to understand.

vbulletin, so far I've been on forums using it and it's been also easy for me to use it.

So there, either phpbb or vbulletin.

 

I run an smf forum and it is great. The free mods you can get for it are useful and there are loads of free templates for it.

GL
Notting