Tapolyai - 6:34 pm on Mar 1, 2005 (gmt 0)

I am in a similar boat.

I am trying to deploy this commercial site that requires, more precisely, depends on discussion forums.

I have to find a decent CMS and a decent forum software that will work with the CMS.

Top two players in the industry are phpBB and vBulletin. Do I go with phpBB and hope for the best when it comes to security backups?
Or do I pay for vBulletin and still hope that the support is truly there?

I have read some horror stories on vBulletin's site, about their customer support and how they treat them unprofessionally. This is second hand, so you will have to research it.

Of course, you will find just as many horror stories about phpBB code failing. Expectation of support on the other hand is much lower when it's a "free" package.

So do I drop several hundred dollars, then pay annual fee, and get bad service, possibly bad code, or do I pay nothing and get bad service and possibly bad code?

As far as security is concerned, SecurityFocus BUGTRAQ reports about 40% more vulnerabilities and Advisories for phpBB then to vBulletin. Taking that and then looking at the number of public vBulletin and phpBB pages, phpBB has about 78% more pages. (19,500,000 vBulletin and 92,000,000 for phpBB on google "+vBulletin" and "+phpBB" searches)

So as far as I am concerned they both are as bad or as good (half empty or half full) when it comes to security.

It's a perfect "loose loose" scenario for a webmaster.