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Search for Decent Forum Software Posted at 16:05 by Eric

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?

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FUDforum      Posted at Fri Nov 11 14:31:49 2005 by Lon
Hey Eric, I'd throw FUDforum into your mix. Not as pretty as phpBB and it might be a little more complex to implement, but I find it very nicely put together. Free. A lot of features only found in pay-for forum packages. Here are a few notables: Support for thread views of conversations, gateways to integrating with an email mailing list and also NNTP-based newsgroups. Check it out.

     Posted at Sat May 13 22:27:47 2006 by DK
Check out simple Simple Machines. http://www.simplemachines.org/ It used to be YaBB SE. I have set it up a couple times and I ran a fairly popular website with YaBB SE. http://vld.kw-studios.com if you want to see an example.


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