Why vBulletin is recommended?

What are you referring to exactly in regards to SEO ? VBulletin 4 onwards has the option for search engine friendly url addresses similar to what you are seeing now in your browser address window. Any other SEO stuff is something that you would have to address with any kind of website.

VBulletin has better third party support than any other other forum software. Have a look at www.vbulletin.org/forum/portal.php , there is plenty of free stuff available.

You get what you pay for. They are the costs of running a serious forum. If you just want something for a few online friends, try a free hosted forum option.

1. Do you want something proven with the best third party support and addons ?

2. Thats entirely up to you. You will see a lot of people that suggest going with a particular brand, and thats generally just because someone else said its good.

3. As I mentioned earlier, you get what you pay for in my opinion. If somethings breaks, dont expect easy fixes and instant support.

4. Rubbish I would say.

What you will find at the moment, is a number of people posting anti VBulletin rhetoric to try and sway people in to supporting a newer forum software. I started my forum originally using UBB (Ultimate Bulletin Board) in the late 90"s and switched to VBulletin 2 when it came out. Over time, I have upgraded to VBulletin 3 and only recently upgraded to VBulletin 4. All forum software has bugs when it first comes out and I have found it far better to wait at least a year before upgrading to a newer version.

Another thing you might want to consider is long term stability.....Vbulletin is established software that has been around longer than a decade. It might be what you call expensive, but what would you prefer ? A company with no money for development ?

 

Any, or should I say every forum gets spam. I seriously doubt your claims.

Any forum of a reasonable size in content and traffic will attract spam and it just comes down to how you deal with it. Again, it comes down to third party support and VBulletin has more of it than SMF. Even better, a decent spam solution that works is free. There are many examples at vbulletin.org.

 

Never used SimplePress in my life. I absolutely despise integrating a forum into a blog/CMS - plugins like that usually are pretty basic.


As for the support, yes it is important. Because the ToS of both solutions does not allow the codebase (even modified, I think) to be pushed out publicly, official support is very important so that the forum software lives up to the customers' needs and the changing world of related technology.

Usually opensource boards get more spam because of a simple barrier that prevents spammers from cracking the inner working - the price. Of course, once you get past that nothing can stop you and this does not take nulled scripts into count, but still a barrier nonetheless.

vBulletin 4 looked promising when Kier said vB4 will be a complete code rewrite (maybe not be exactly XF as we know today, but pretty close) that will bring superiority to vB back, but then IB sank the idea and decided that they would use a completely shitty base for Agile development.
So here we are.