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Looking for forum software recommendations, both commercial and free
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Looking for forum software recommendations, both commercial and free

marcmmarcm Member
edited November 2012 in General

Basically we are looking at creating a forum primarily for our customers, but also for everyone else who wants to join. I am looking at getting some input from other members of this community about forum software, what works and what doesn't.

So far I have been looking at:
commercial:

  • vBulletin
  • IP.Board
  • XenForo (they are in a lawsuit with vBulletin so I'm not sure what will happen in the end)

free/open source:

  • Vanilla Forums
  • phpBB
  • myBB
  • Simple Machines Forum v. 2
  • FluxBB - thanks @telephone

Please make your recommendations and suggestions, and I am also looking for anyone who wants to share their experience with forum software that they have worked with, maybe recommend something that I haven't tried yet.

Thank you,
Marc

«13

Comments

  • MyBB for phpBB

  • To be brutally honest, I doubt it matters as your forums will more than likely be empty. (Almost all provider forums gather dust)... So you might as well save some money and go for the free option.

    It's not on the list, but I'd suggest FluxBB.

  • marcmmarcm Member
    edited November 2012

    @telephone said: To be brutally honest, I doubt it matters as your forums will more than likely be empty. (Almost all provider forums gather dust)... So you might as well save some money and go for the free option.

    It's not on the list, but I'd suggest FluxBB.

    I don't plan to place it on a subdomain or close it off from the outside world. It might gather dust, I don't know, but I think that it will be a cool thing to thinker with.

    Thanks for the FluxBB suggestion @telephone

  • wdqwdq Member
    edited November 2012

    FluxBB. +1

  • i think choose open source with many features. being fast/efficient does not matter if forum is small.

  • NexusNexus Member
    edited November 2012

    People here love fluxbb because it's lightweight and fast and can scale with hundrends of users online with no problem at all. I guess i'll "+1 it" too.

    https://forum.ramhost.us/bbs/

    These company forums are insanely fast, I get instant page loads here in WA State. (30MS ping)..... But @marcm if you want an example of speed, check out the above link, insanely fast. You could slap a decent logo as well and still maintain speed ability, so no worries.

  • SMF is a great one i have used, very mod friendly also.

  • +1 for Simple Machines. Tons of modifications available, and the source code is pretty sane for a full-featured forum, making it extremely easy to customize. There's also tons of excellent themes available, both free and paid, particularly from DzinerStudio. I'm also a fan of the Simple Portal modification, which makes it easy to make a nice looking homepage for the forum, along with other custom pages, too.

  • @NickM said: +1 for Simple Machines

    +2. Know quite a few good forums that use it and it's been very neat.

  • marcmmarcm Member
    edited November 2012

    @NickM - Thanks for the DzinerStudio link, those clean themes look neat. I don't mind paying for quality themes/software :) - Any other companies / businesses that make commercial themes for SMF?

    Anyone has any thoughts on the commercial ones? Looks like I got plenty of recommendations for SMF.

  • @concerto49 said: +2. Know quite a few good forums that use it and it's been very neat.

    +3 never have/had a problem with em since years ago

  • @marcm said: Any other companies / businesses that make commercial themes for SMF?

    The only other one that I know about is LogoOff, but I haven't actually used any of their themes. When I was looking for themes, there were plenty of others out there offering commercial themes (just google "SMF premium themes"), but nothing I found matched the quality of DS, really.

  • @NickM - Just looked up LogoOff, and you're right, not even close to DS. They subscription model is a bit off-putting. I prefer to own things, real or virtual, rather than lease/subscribe. But if I end up using SMF, then they are my #1 choice.

  • Another SMF vote here. I've been a user since the early days. It suits all my needs, and is easy to either integrate with or extend.

  • @Roph any database issues with SMF?

  • which is the most resource friendly? fluxbb?

  • Ipb.

  • @jcaleb - Resources aren't a problem. I want good functionality and a pleasant interface ;)

  • @jcaleb said: which is the most resource friendly? fluxbb?

    SMF does just fine for me. Almost 2 million page views per month, 400 members online, on a 512 OpenVZ.

  • @NickM - What's so special about vBulletin? I see lots of forums using v3 and v4 ? :-)

  • PHPBB is not a good idea, it is old, broken, spam ridden, and frankly unusable. Vanilla is great and if you tune, you can handle a ton of requests. "memcached"

  • I like both vBulletin and IP.Board from commercial part.
    But SMF is really great and OSS. It have good comminity, many mods are available for it and it is easily customizable. And its pretty resource friendly, able to work with caches. I'd go for it.
    Btw there is a nice site forummatrix.org to compare/check forum software features

  • phpbb is not old and broken. when you use it right there's no spam.

    i use phpbb for most forums. its got slot of caching options and works well with trafficpears i found

  • XenForo gets my vote from the commercial one's: I love the default template's design! :D
    On the other hand, If I would go with an OSS solution, I'd say SMF.

  • @George_Fusioned - I would buy XenForo but I am worried about the whole lawsuit thing with vBulletin and the fact that no one has heard from the staff since the end of June. That just doesn't look right to me.

  • fluxBB looks pretty neat. Didn't even know it existed.

    Also VB5 is looking ok now. http://www.vbulletin.com/vb5demo/forum

  • @soluslabs - Thanks for the input :-)

    On a side note, I was looking through the SolusVM documentation and noticed that you guys added support for Nginx. That's awesome, as I will switch my two masters from Lighttpd to Nginx.

  • I've used SMF to be a middle man when migrating mybb to other bb's. Flux looks nice.

  • I prefer FluxBB. very light and easy to use. :)

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