forum script recommendations

[leoo24]

hey guys,

i've sifted through tons of forums and wondered if anyone had any forums they could recommend, need not be said that that i'm looking for smallest files sizes and most SE friendly ones

cheers

leo

[TheDoctor]

I use WebBBS: shareware, written in Perl, with a very good support forum. You can optionally make postings search-engnie friendly or not at the flick of a switch (well, actually, you have to type a 0 or 1 on your keyboard).

[rogerd]

Leo, how important are features like flexible e-mail notification, powerful moderation, etc.? Windows or Linux server?

[georgeek]

Take a look at ASPPlayground. I have used it and it's feature rich, easy to customize, very well supported and can handle 10,000 posts a day without a problem. The latest version ASPPlayground.NET, which I haven't tried yet, is supposed to be even better.

[rogerd]

Georgeek, what do the URLs look like on your board? I glanced at a few of their live links, and most had multiple variable query strings. I found one that looked like it was rewriting URLs in static mode, but even they were pretty ugly, like www.mysite.com/myforum/This_is_the_name_of_a_thread/var1/var2/var3/

[webustaad]

vbulletin 3 is in beta 4 stage. I purchased it last week and now most of my threads are listed on [google.com...] and [yahoo.com....]

[rogerd]

Hi, webustaad. I recently purchased vB3 also, but haven't implemented it yet. How have you dealt with the SessionID issue to get good indexing? Are you rewriting the URLs? So far, vBulleting seem to be keeping the lid on hacks for vB3 until it is out of beta.

[NeedScripts]

vB3 has a new feature called "archive" that in a way allows search engine spiders to index the whole forum... however it is not very good in many ways.. as within archive pages, there are going to be many pages with hundreds of links and no text - something that search engines don't really recommend.

NS

[Ankheg]

I may not be normal, but I really like PHPBB with the "SE Mod", gzip enabled, and the flat-file cache. Very fast, flexible, powerful, and sufficiently SE-friendly for most purposes. (A good robots.txt file works wonders, to keep the bots from trying to post, for instance).

Just my 2p worth.

[me2287]

If you are interest in a basic forum try [navarone.f2o.org...] - I dont mind it.

[Robino]

Not sure what you want to do but I like Invision Power Boards.

[georgeek]

...what do the URLs look like on your board?

rogerd I sent you a sticky

[rogerd]

In looking at the ASPPlayground examples, it looks like they do have a solution for creating static-looking URLs. I'd say the concept of turning the thread name into an apparent directory name is kind of odd, and overall the URLs look rather convoluted. That doesn't mean they won't get spidered, but I'd certainly opt for a cleaner looking URL. This forum is probably the gold standard for simple, static-looking URLs.

[leoo24]

cheers for the responses guys :)

rogerd, linux server, i prioritise speed and spider friendliness over extra moderating features etc, all i would really need are the basic 'board' features. You are correct in that this board is a great standard to follow, when is bestbbs gonna be released then hmmm ;)

[georgeek]

I'd say the concept of turning the thread name into an apparent directory name is kind of odd, and overall the URLs look rather convoluted.

I believe ASPPlayground gives you a choice. Here is a quote from their feature list ...also has the option for you to embed the name of the link into the URL, thus increase the "relevance" for each link.

[rogerd]

Georgeek, it really looks like the ASPPlayground authors are SE-aware. That's a big plus, IMO. It seems like some of the other major packages have gone out of their way to make it difficult to get spidered and indexed.

Leoo24, I think Brett was looking at a fall '03 beta release time-frame, but releasing BestBBS is probably a secondary priority to coping with the growth here at WebmasterWorld. For a less-known but well-tested forum, I'd suggest looking at Discusware. I've had good success with a 3.x forum - it creates static pages with very clean URLs, and a few tweaks to the code allow decent optimization. Their current release is 4.x, but I haven't worked with it. The board is user-friendly, but the moderation in 3.x is a bit weaker than what is offered by other packages. It's capable of handling high volumes, but the moderation gets more time-intensive.

[leoo24]

thanks rogerd, i'll have a look into it :)

yeah, i can quite imagine brett is pretty busy to say the least!