Battle Royale part ][ - Forums!

[draggar]

Let's hear it! The good, the bad, and the ugly! We have phpBB and vBulliten as the main players but there are many smaller players out there (SMF for example).

I've never used vBulliten (never had a site that needed a forum that was paid for).

vBulliten is good for beginners and across the board easy to use but I'm finding SMF (Simple Machines Forum) is better. Very easy theme and add-on / hack implementation (no spending an hour copy and pasting code etc..), great captcha and rather friendly but...

I have noticed that phpBB will rule SMF any day when it comes to SEO. My phpBB forums get picked up and indexed very quickly but my SMF forums are very slow to be indexed (if they're indexed at all).

Anyone else? Feel free to add other software packages (this is a discussion, please do not promote your own packages and/or services).

[accomatic]

I've used vBulletin, phpBB (v.2 and 3), SMF.

vBulletin is the most coolest one, it has great community, many addons (hacks) and themes. The only drawback is the price. Most great forums run vB, including DNF.

phpBB is good, especially because it is free. The phpBB's built-in captcha is weak, so forum spammers love it. Otherwise, this is great software for small communities. There're large forums built on top of phpBB, but I'm sure they rewrote many core functions for speed and resource usage.

SMF is good too, looks rather huge, and there are rumors about unpatched insecurities (quite a few forums got hacked, but it could be because of other buggy software installed along with SMF, or insecure Hosting).

All mentioned forums have SEO addons, and Google is happy with it.

Does anyone have experience with Woltlab Burning Board (woltlab.com)?

[beansbaxter]

There is just no contest. vBulletin.

[bwhhisc]

Another niche domain forum opened about a year ago with Simple Machines, and the members complained until they finally changed it over to VB. In reading the various posts, it had more to do with the ease of use, and familiarity to users that made them more attuned to the site.

[draggar]

Another niche domain forum opened about a year ago with Simple Machines, and the members complained until they finally changed it over to VB. In reading the various posts, it had more to do with the ease of use, and familiarity to users that made them more attuned to the site.

Odd, I've had no complaints (even though the couple of communities that use SMF don't have a huge client base yet).

So, here's a question - how compatible from one to the other is the database? Can I easily throw a phpBB on a site that uses SMF and point phpBB to the same database and have it use the same data as SMF? How about vBulliten?

[Andrew Shaw]

I use SMF for my forum, a very easy interface, and in my opinion very basic. It takes very little knowledge to run, and manage a forum with SMF.

I also have a PHPbb forum, but I still prefer the control panel, and overall looks of SMF.

I've never used VB... But cost aside, I would without a doubt choose VB over SMF or PHPbb. You get what you pay for.

[accomatic]

So, here's a question - how compatible from one to the other is the database? Can I easily throw a phpBB on a site that uses SMF and point phpBB to the same database and have it use the same data as SMF? How about vBulliten?

Each software has its own database schema, so the answer is: NO, you cannot just point other forum software to the same database, just like you cannot take a Toyota engine and put it into Honda car.

There're many migration tools available for popular forum software, so you can transfer most of the data (not all) over to the new platform. So in most circumstances the transition will be fairly smooth.