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Does anyone have any recommendations for the best forum software out there? PHPBB? vBulletin? Invision Power Board? A friend of mine is starting a site that will include a message board. He is new to it all so something user-friendly and secure would be ideal.
I like Invision Power Board. It has good capabilities for keeping out unwanted traffic if you're running a low-profile board and don't need anyone to connect from those countries where most spam comes from. It's also cheaper than vBulletin.
PHPbb is too vulnerable to hacking IMO, unless you're extremely diligent with installing the latest patches.
I'd recommend SimpleMachines (SMF), PunBB or PhPBB. PhpBB seems to be past their hacky stage but as the most popular free board out there they are targets for attack. If you want to go paid then take vBulletin over InvisionBoard... but I wouldn't waste the money on a new site - it's very hard to make a successful & popular forum. The net is populated with ghost forums. Go free then if the site is a success spend the money and port it over to Vbulletin.
I would have said VBB but version 4 is COMPLETE GARBAGE (Unless you wanna spend time rewriting everything to keep the same quality you had with earlier VBB versions)
PHPbb is too vulnerable to hacking IMO, unless you're extremely diligent with installing the latest patches.
That applied to phpBB2, before it's release phbb3 went through an extensive paid security audit where no major issues were found. Since it's release in 2007 phpBB3 has had only a few minor vulnerabilities and even those were pretty small potatoes. There has been no "hackable" security issues like SQL injection.
Invision:
MyBB:
I believe both of those were released prior to 2007 so keep that in mind. You can view more here:
Thanks for the input. I just posted about wanting to learn about DotNetNuke and they do have a forum module. Does anyone have any experience with them?
Personally I would stick with popular standalone applications and then bridge them especially for something like a forum that has the potential to become a big asset down the road. On the topic of bridging when you bridge web applications you want to make sure you can break the bridge easily and still have two separate functioning applications. You need to think of the future. For example there is lot of applications you can bridge to phpBB; Mediawiki and popular image galleries just to name a few.
As another example if you're using any popular forum software nearly everyone of them is going to have a conversion program. You can pretty easily move between phpBB, Vbulletin etc. If you're using something that has a little following that conversion script becomes much harder find and if you can't write it yourself you might end up paying some big bucks to get it done.
Last edited by thecoalman; 12-05-2010 at 06:30 PM..
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