Top Forum Package

[mikeD]

Which forum package do you rate the best?, have justed installed Invision Board and it seems pretty impressive. One piece of advice is to never use UBB forum package, had it hacked 5 times and it's just a error riddled mess.

[sun818]

The session ID appended to the URL on Invision Board might be hell on search engine crawlers. It just looks like a hack of phpBB to me.

[edited by: Marcia at 5:26 am (utc) on Sep. 24, 2002]
[edit reason] email off per member request [/edit]

[mack]

the best , soon to be on the market is BestBBS

Hotscripts.com seams to be the best place to go searching for this sort of thing, I recently tried Iconboard. seams ok but not sure what it woudl be like with high traffic.

[BlobFisk]

You could try Snitz forums too. It's free and easy to set up. It runs on ASP, so it is easy to alter the look and feel to your liking if you so wish. Runs from an MDB, but I think that a mySQL database may have been added in to a recent version...

I've heard that it can be a resource hog, but I suppose that would depend on the levels of traffic you expect.

[chris_f]

You could try Snitz forums too

Agreed. Easy to setup and I've had no trouble.

Which forum package do you rate the best?

The one I'm currently building ;).

Chris.

[KakenBetaal]

Brett's BestBBS is probably the best, although a large part of the success of these forums must be due to the top quality long term approach and excellent moderation that's to be found here. Not currently available, as far as I know.

I use phpBB2 on my site, and given that it's free (GPL) software, I think it's pretty excellent. I'd highly rate phpBB2, and recommend it to anyone.

Support on the phpbb.com website is very good, much better than that given by many/most commercial companies. I've found one drawback is that you can't splice topics together if you need to, but that's been promised for the next version, and is not a serious issue for me.

[KakenBetaal]

I forgot to add that there are at least two hacks to avoid the sid wrapper problem. My forums are getting indexed quite nicely at the moment.

[mosley700]

I noticed that some forums are not cached by Google. This should be a consideration. My forum is a bit simple ( devbb ) but because Google does cache it, I get quite a bit of traffic entering from the various forum threads.
I believe Ultimate Bulletin Board is not cached... Is this correct?

[mosley700]

KakenBetaal, I love that phpBB.
But does it get cached?

[NeedScripts]

Also, you can hack phpbb2 and make it static :) It works great.

[dvduval]

I got my Snitz forums hacked. It is quintessential that you keep up to date with updates to forums, because security can be a major issue. I have 3 phpBB forums that are great. Snitz is probably ok also (just not for me). I think phpBB is the most widespread of all. Just search on Google and there are more results for phpBB than any other forum.
vbulletin is known to be a solid product also.

[KakenBetaal]

Mosley700, yes, my forums do get indexed by Google, even with the dynamic URL. I implemented a simpler hack which doesn't apply a sid to the URL for non-registered/non-cookie user agents such as Google and Inktomi, because IMO that will cause a problem.