My step son has been talking about opening an ATV - off roading - 4-wheel drive forum for a long time. A couple of weeks ago he finally bought the domain name, and he asked about the software he should use. He does not have a lot of money to drop on commercial software - so I suggested SMF or MYBB. Between those two, I recommended MYBB over SMF. There were 2 main reasons why I suggested MYBB over SMF - lack of updates from the SMF project and lack of support. SMF 2.X has been in development for a long, long time. And now, the ownership of the SMF project is in question. I can not find a link to the exact article, but there is a lot of dispute as to "who" has the right to guide the SMF project. All of this does not look good for the community. I see no reason to suggest software that is tied up in a legal battle. The last time I used SMF on a forum - which was about 18 months ago - modifications had problems installing, some mods had to be installed with the default SMF theme, some mods changed permissions on files,,,,, it was a big mess. Lack of support - when I was using SMF, I could post a question and for the most part it would be ignored. Spam protection - my opinion, the SMF spam protect is pretty weak. When I set my forum up, spammers where hitting it within days. I just can not see taking a first time forum owner, and put him through what I had to deal with when I was using SMF.
MyBB 1.6x was just released as Beta. It will probably be less than 6 months before release. The development schedule of MyBB has been pretty good for such a small team. 1.4.0 was released less than 2 years ago and 2 years before that was 1.2x. http://wiki.mybboard.net/index.php/Versions MyBB plans a 2.0 to be after 1.6x which is going to be a major upgrade and overhaul. That might take 2-3 years to get into beta but unlike SMF and PHPBB it won't sit in development for 5-6 years. PHPBB 3 was started in 2002 and RC1 of phpbb3 wasn't out till 2007. SMF suffers the same type of problems as phpbb. Lack of clear direction and sometimes I wonder if people aren't just satisfied with their current version. So far MyBB has not seem satisfied and continues toward the use of the latest technologies. Good luck btw with your step sons forum. I'm sure with your knowledge he has a fighting chance at success.
I am still getting support at SMF. SMF has an active community. If there are problems I don't think there aren't solutions.
I love how active the Mybb support forums are, I submit a problem and in less than 10 minutes I normally get a response which is normally how to fix it and in about 5 minutes the thread I submitted gets about 200 views.
Phew, it's my first time heard MyBB.... I just noticed that mybb's official has a good traffic rank, I'll keep a eye on it. (I'm looking for an well-designed open-sourced forum software for quite a long time)
I was always a vBulletin user until vBulletin4, then I decided to try MyBB, what an awesome forum script.
Version 1.6 is due anyday now. The official MyBB.com forums are now running it so it's going to be soon. If you're about to start a new forum I suggest you wait till it's released to avoid a 1.4x -> 1.6x upgrade.
I agree with your perspective kev. myBB is looking better at each day when compared to other free or commercial options.