I've been on the lookout for a decent forum package. I don't particularly like forums, but users seem to for one reason or another :-) Open Source is nice, but there's a lot of badly done OSS forums. I'm willing to spend money if it's good.

There's a few I ran across that stuck out:

• phpBB -- this is commonly used, seems to work well, reasonably pretty, etc etc. But, it has the track record of BIND and Sendmail in the 90's. For some of the security concious I know, it became the first source of a system breakin, and there's even worms running around knocking at it's doors. Ugh.
• Burning Board -- Wolf Labs offers Burning Board. It's half decent, costs about $50, and seems to be in use in at least a few places. I noticed it at the 77's site (which, incidentally, will be on tour in 2 weeks with Michael Pritzel, woohoo!). What caught my eye about this wasn't the product, it was the website. The company is clearly German. But on the top of their site is a pretty picture of Toronto. Odd.
• vBulletin -- this seems to be one of the more popular ones. It costs $160. There seem to be a lot of organizations with it in place for support forums, but it doesn't have the same aweful track record as phpBB.

Are there other decent forum packages available that you'd recommend?

Yet again, it's been an obnoxiously long time since I've posted a durn thing. I've actually had some really cool things going on though, and I look forward to writing about them soon. Until then, a few other things (some of which are provacative :-)

• First, I've recently taken a liking to speadable cheese. That, and Ritz crackers. Yummy :-)
• I think the idea that people from any country can come into ours illegally, have children, and expect for them to be fully cared for and schooled is nuts. Making the matter worse is that our ability to guard the borders is provably weak, and money set aside to help with that has been shuffled elsewhere.

  It looks like some folks are finally getting brave enough to stand up and do something about it. Even much of Europe, who most Americans seem to adore (it's not just a mattress, it's a European mattress!), has done away with the birthright citizen policy :-)

• Right now in the medical community, there is an ethics policy regarding organ donors. There is a list you are on, and you have the right to an organ donation purely based on how long you've been on the list. Nothing else matters... age, sex, what you do in life, how much you make. It's just about the list.

  Organ donations typically occur when someone dies. The big exception to that is that a family member is allowed to donate to someone in the family, regardless of ones place on the list.

  Here's where things get hairy... there's a new website, matchingdonors.com, which is setup for people who need organs to make their case for receiving an organ now, from a live donor, regardless of their place on the list.

  So, if you need a kidney, you go on that site, tell the world about yourself, and hope someone decides to give you one. The thing is that it's been working... and right now, there are some 2500 people signed up to be able to give organs as a live donor. But the medical community isn't sure how to take this, it bypasses their existing ethics system, sort of.

  It's hard to get a good take on the matter. I can appreciate the idea that there's an ethical issue with putting a value on someones head. At the same time, there's never before been a time where so many people have been willing to part with an organ, and they're willing to do so because they get to pick and choose who they feel they relate with, or who they would want to help.

  Without this site, these live donors would not be donating. Many of the people they've donated to would be dead by now without their help, those people were too far down on the list to be helped by the existing system.

  What do you think?

• And lastly, I just thought I'd mention that I have a good bit of my Christmas shopping finished already :-) And coming soon will be the 2005 Christmas Price Index.