Hi,

Just wants your opinions on some of the major forum softwares (both free and that requires a license).

- vBulletin
- PHPBB3 (we're using this now)
- SMF
- Invision Power Board (IPB)

Mention any others if you like. Just want to see if our opinions match, so I can spend some time playing around with either SMF or phpBB3!

I've been administering SMF forum(s) for quite a while now and I find it excellent. I've never used phpBB3, since it lacks some of the features and custom mods SMF has.

Obviously, vBulletin is the absolute best out there, but it isn't free. When it comes to features, if vB doesn't have it, it doesn't exist. It's also a lot faster than the free equivalents.

I have never liked vB, and in my opinion the only people who buy it are those who really know nothing about running a forum/website and just go with a paid solution as they assume because it costs money it will be good.


This is my personal favourite, it in my opinion is the most flexible, customisable and secure of all the forum software. PHPBB does get a bad rap in terms of security, but generally stems from the amount of people still using PHPBB2 which is not secure at all, whereas PHPBB3 is very secure, and when a security issue does arise it is usually fixed within 24 hours.


SMF is an alright forum software. It has its plus points but can at times be finicky and can occasional through a wobbly over nothing (although this is quite rare). It is a good free solution and you do get used to its little caveats and learn to work around them.


I have never really used IPB in-depth to have any solid opinions but from what I've heard, it is very good although can be stubborn at times.




You have been listening to the vB Marketing people, this is an internet myth. It simply isnt true and does make make quite angry when cited

IPB.

SMF

My last 3 PHPBB3 forum installs decided that my admin account no longer had access to my forum software so eventually it had to go, SMF has everything i need and works well

Yes, I've been spoon-fed by the vBulletin marketing campaigns. I've also been using vB forums for a long time and important features such as in-thread searching ("search this thread"), spy, comprehensive user groups (multiple group memberships), proper implementation of subforums and account subscription are all missing from SMF/phpBB3.

Moderating large boards is also a hell of a lot easier in vB than it is in phpBB3 or SMF, the infraction/warning system is golden. Another key point about vB is performance, I've seen it handle easily on a nginx cluster with ~20k simultaneous users and I'm certain SMF or phpBB3 would crack under such pressure.

With vB, things like donating could be easily doable with the forum software alone since it has a paypal plugin.

I like SMF best of the ones listed, but i personally like PHP-Nuke, havent tryed PHP-Nuke Platinum much but i got 2 sites using php-nuke 8.1 (8.1 chost but 8.0 is free)

I recall PHP-Nuke being CMS software that has phpbb3 integrated, which is something I'm not looking for, sorry.

I too got the impression that vB is good (just look at Facepunch).
Which of the free forum softwares would you think is the easiest to modify (to potentially code some of the features that may be useful)?

Somewhere between vB and IPB, but they're pretty similar of the bunch though....
for me it's a tie between those two. I'm assuming IPB is easier to use but I could be wrong too >_>

PHPBB3. Most secure, most versatile.

vB like Jam says, really is just the biggest heap going, unless you put ALOT of work into modding etc.

Finally, someone somewhere agrees with me

Every "which forum software" thing I see its just people reciting what the vB people say

Though, if vBulletin wasn't so expensive I would have already bought it!

Anywho, any other thoughts on SMF?

SMF is very easy to mod. I've retooled my WoW guild's website (link) with heavy modding and you can achieve almost anything you want. As long as you're prepared to spend time with the PHP template system...

Compared to vB it lacks features. The newest version (2.0) addresses some of these, such as multiple user group memberships, i.e. user can be vip and admin, and choose to identify in his profile as one of them or neither, something vB has had for a long time.

It's also easy to couple with TinyPortal to achieve a portal-style look.

As a test, I converted an old version of the phpbb3 database to SMF but it didn't work as I wanted to. The posts converted nicely, so did the forums and threads and shit, but some stuff such as my rights and shit weren't there so I found it hard to even use

Not sure what I'm going to do with phpbb3. I couldn't get a javascript snippet working the other day, though I want to redesign the design.