Best message boards?

[Amanda]

Out of these, which one is the best?

phpBB2
Invision Board
XMB

[dvduval]

You'll get a lot of answers on this, but I've always liked phpbb. Note phpbb's homepage has a PageRank of 10!

[fidibidabah]

I praise phpAnything.

Heck, I even like phpNuke. Clean, comfortable, makes it easy for people who don't know too much about coding to make a friendly, pretty, community. PHP just makes things cleaner.. imho.

[rogerd]

It's not on your list, but vBulletin has a huge following. (Not free, though.)

One way to check out software like this is to visit the software site's support forum - it's a good snapshot as to current issues, available hacks, etc.

A couple of questions - how did you narrow the field to those three, and what do you expect for your forum in terms of volume of members/posts? Also, be sure to check out the Forum Community Building [webmasterworld.com] forum here at WebmasterWorld for discussion of related topics.

[vkaryl]

I've been familiar with phpBB for a number of years. In those years, I've also tried almost everything else out there. I'm still using phpBB on the forums where it matters most - that is the "public, active" ones.

Depends on what you want though: phpBB does take a fair amount of tweaking and modding to customize.

[edward301]

IPB has an impressive range of modifications and features it also has a huge number of skins avaliable for it around the internet but it has recently become very comercialised and is clearly there to make.

PHPBB2 is clean simple to use and setup the range of skins/mods is a lot less but every thing u need is provided or avaliable.

[Amanda]

Thank you all for your replies

rogerd,
I picked these three because 2 of them are listed in Fantastico in my cpanel and would be a snap to install. And for my forum right now, I use XMB, but I'm not really happy with it, and I'm waiting to switch. I think I'm going to go with phpbb2, I've checked out their support forum and it looks like they've got a lot of help over there, in case I ever need help.

For my forum, I really don't need a lot of features, pretty basic needs.

[RoadRash]

vbulletin. But I would upgrade to BestBBS if given the chance.

[webdev]

Yep me too, any idea when its likely to be released if ever as its had a coming soon page up for ages now.

[walkman]

which one is easier on the server? I heard that even 200 people online require a huge server for VBulletin.