My company is just looking at launching our first forum, but I am not sure what software to choose. Could you reference some of the more popular forum software apps? I know of vBulletin, and PHPbb but am looking for some others as well. Thanks in advance.
SMF has been recently coming up with both cosmetic as well as functional upgrades , but still i have yet to try it out .
IPB, Invision PowerBoard is another extremely popular option. You do need to pay for a lisence though. As far as free software, punBB and myBB have had good things said about them, though I've no personal experience with either.
vBulletin and Invision Power Board are by far the strongest pieces of software out there...but what are your needs here? Is this just a small project or is it going to be full-fledged? Do you have a budget? Any special needs? Good looking skin, special mod/hack, speed, security, etc.? The reason I ask all of this is because there is no one single forum software which will meet the needs of everybody.
Consider http://www.mybboard.org My political site in my sig uses it. It's very very close to VB except free!
I've run at least one forum that was big enough to take a dedicated server down. After 5 years of running it and trying different programs, I'm stuck on vbulletin. There are really 3 common choices. PhpBB, invision powerbaord, and vbulletin. phpBB is very common, but very server intensive. If you get busy, you're going to have problems. Also a favourite hacker target. Best of the free ones, not as good as the paid alternatives. invision and vbulletin are fairly close in terms of pricing and features. I went with vbulletin for only minor reasons. Nice administration, and if the site gets busy you can actually tune performance (turn off server intensive features) right through the admin panel. Great support as well. For me, vbulletin won out by a slim margin.
even with IPB u can turn of server intensive features . advantage of vB i see till date being older than IPB and thus having well developed mods and available integration packages with other scripts more than IPB .
In my past experiences, I have always preferred Invision Power Board over most other systems, including vBulletin. The only suggestion I'd have is to stay away from phpBB. In this limited time that I have used it, I have had mass problems with it.
if you are worried about server resources go with punbb.org ! ... I have it on my soccer forum and it is great so far ....
Well if you see from my point of view, consider investing it in Vbulletin! It's simply the best! And their community is awesome! Abhishek
I have used them all apart from SMF which I am told is very good, however I suppose the main question is price. If your looking at free then phpbb although not the best design in the world is a very good board and I know many that are running at 50,000+ members and way in excess of millions of posts and it works well. If your looking at paying then Vbulletin hands down, the software is getting better all the time and the support community is the best by far.