I'm not even going to read the rest of the post, just gonna chime right in. I've used them all. If you absolutely can't dish out any money go with SMB.. phpBB is a hackers dreamland. That said.. vBulletin or Invision. Take your pick. I use vBulletin exclusively because I find it easier to work with than IPB. Is VB worth the money? In a word YES! I can't say that about IPB. Especially when you get into the world of large boards. An Owned VB license is $160.00 A leased license (good for a year) is $85.00 Which to do.. depends on how well you think your forum will do in a year. If your conifdent it'll make the $160 back or you know your going to keep it for longer than 12 months then just get the owned license and don't worry with anymore. Otherwise, fork out the $85 and see what happens.
vBulletin is great , I managed to put up a decent forum a couple months ago without any programming skills at all. You get what you pay for
IMO, phpBB is great to be free. Yes, it is the most hacked forum software but that is because it is the most widely used! Why would someone waste time learning how to hack software that no uses??? phpBB has many available mods and a great support staff. (Yes, you can put adsense on phpBB, or any other advertising for that matter) So, phpBB will work fine if you don't want to spend money on vBulletin.
SMF if you want it integrated with CMS! Joomla SMF integrates very nicely. else stick to phpBB. I dont know whats so great about VB though, you can get everything it has to offer in the open source ones.
Do you know any links where the phpBB issues are discussed ?? I like to know more about as i just started using it.
Want to see vB growing pains? check out pinoyexchange.com . It is busy very very often, the mods even had to turn off avatars.. But I guess one problem is their server (maybe it's not zend optimized or accelerated?) and their version isn't the latest one too. But golly, there's more than a million posts there already.
The babesandstuff.com vbulletin forum got hacked - as mentioned, no software whether paid or open source can be said to be 100% secure.
Go to google and do a search for : phpbb "hacked by" Check out the pages from half way onwards to the next pages . phpBB is an amazing forum software and easy to use and very nice to skin etc. The unfortunate fact remains that it is hacked too much to be worthwile considering. If you are after a free forum software, go with SMF which has a fantastic community and lots of mods to satisfy any forum webmaster. Go with vbulletin for payed option.
Vbulletin, its not expensive for the product and help you get at their forum!!!! (you wont get any where near that amount of help with phpbb)
100% SMF. I don't believe anyone who really used SMF and phpBB can compare them. SMF is more secure than phpBB, can be updated and modified Easily and much more...!