Best PHP/MySQL Forum?

[hdpt00]

I am considering using vBulletin or phpBB or possibly other recommended ones. What are the pros/cons of each? I am putting it on an established site and would expect a fairly heavy load. What is better with system resources and such? Also, I should be able to assign moderators to any topic in the forum such as what is done here. A pay system for paying members might want to be worked in eventually, not sure yet. But that should be easily integrated.

Any recommendations would be great.

Thanks!

[isitreal]

phpBB will do everything you need. I can't speak for vBulliten because I've never used it. Main drawbacks with phpbb I've seen are very bad default design, and extremely difficult to redo templating system, took me a few days to get it right, looks ok now though.

phpBB let's you have all the forum options you're looking for, maybe somebody else can talk about vbulliten.

You have to be ready however to do some customizing of the code in phpbb, not everything works the way you want out of the box, took me a while to learn that, but there are very good packages that walk you through the customizations.

If you are expecting a lot of traffic you probably want to look into the flat file options in phpbb, that's supposed to drastically reduce server load, that's how WebmasterWorld does it too.

Part of a good design of phpbb would be to get rid of all those stupid button graphics and use either links or the straight unstyled buttons, or css buttons, just not image buttons, that adds to server load. Just look at WebmasterWorld as the model for how to basically do it right.

[Voltec]

My favorite was xmbforum - it has continously been updated and I never had a problem with it's security (aka, I never got hacked). I was able to customize it for my website at the time I was running it. Before I made my decision, I went to each of the PHP message boards and searched for 'hacked' to find problems that they have had.

Now as a slight disclaimer, I have not had an active board for the past year since I have been out to sea WAY too much - but thankfully that is about to change. We are finally coming back and I will be rotating off my ship as it goes into the 'Yards'. I will be researching again once I get back and can use my cable modem at home... researching on the ship is too slow and painful...

Take care,
Matt

[brendan3eb]

From what I have heard, vbulletin is good because they have a member's area where they hand out awesome add-ons.

The forum, I have always used is invisionboard, it's very user-friendly and its probably the best forum I've used feature-wise. It uses mysql though, so if you have more than 10000 members you'll get a heavy server load from sql queries.

[Voltec]

Brenden3eb,

Has IB fixed their security holes? I used it awhile back and abandoned it cold after my board was hacked. I don't remember the version number, but I was using all of the patches available at the time, but after my board index was replaced with a hackers trademark, I dropped it and did more research and settled on XMBforum... I hope they fixed their vunerabilities in later versions.

Matt

[brendan3eb]

I'm not sure, my site does not appeal to hackers, so I don't worry much, but if your not worried about being hacked I'd use it, there a few sites that have hacks for the script that you can add to add more security. I don't know any off-hand, phpbb still has the most hacks and is the safest.