Forum Moderators: open
Can anyone recommend a good message board program?
What should I avoid?
Thank you in advance.
I'd suggest using our site search function and reading the past threads here on this topic (there have been many).
You'll want to pin down what functionality you absolutely can't do without, and what you would prefer, if possible. Reading the past posts can help you focus on what many of the issues are.
However, if you want to use these boards for SEO work too, I would recommend UBB (not a free board). It will give you the ablity to have static pages.
If you have tons and tons of members and if you don't really care about SEO benefits that you can get from that board, I would hightly recommend PHPBB and VB. They both are using php and mysql, and both are super fast.
Hope this will help.
Vishal
It is a bit overly graphic based out of the box, so we have got rid of some of the junk like "avators" for each poster and all the cute smilies, and disabled people being able to have images in their posts and signiatures. Like PhpBB and YABB it is database driven, meaning not good for SEO. We are considering whether to host it on a server all its own or just use robots.txt to keep spiders out of its directory.
It is a hard board to keep running, there are quite a few exploits that will take it down, and if someone decides to pick on you, say adios to the board. I learned the hard way; it isn't worth it (even if its free).
Is there any good use for the old type of threaded message boards, where each post in a thread has a title? I've been thinking that might be handy in some cases, where users may want to see an overall reference to all the posts at once.
Anybody here?
