Creating A Forum

[jshaffstall]

I just started a forum recently, and initially went the phpBB route. The more I tried to get everything to work the way I wanted it to, the harder everything got. I switched to vbulletin, and everything went extremely smoothly.

So if the forum is something that you hope to make money from, so you can justify the $85 for the first year of vbulletin, I'd highly recommend going that route.

Jay

[JeremyMorgan]

Originally Posted by jshaffstall

I just started a forum recently, and initially went the phpBB route. The more I tried to get everything to work the way I wanted it to, the harder everything got. I switched to vbulletin, and everything went extremely smoothly.

I've had the exact opposite results. For the last 7-8 years I've been installing and running forums for customers, and I've found PHPBB and SimpleMachines to be the most straightforward and reliable setups. I've installed vbulletin, and even owned it myself at one time, and I got at least 5x the complaints from customers about unexpected results, and things simply not working properly. If you start putting in plugins/hacks you can guarantee problems.

And Impex is the biggest joke out there. It only works about 25% of the time I've ever used it. I've went many rounds with vbulletin's (paid) support, only to have them tell me my database is bad and I need to reinstall it. Personally, I can think of much better ways to spend 85$.

However, phpbb is a security issue waiting to happen, you definitely need to upgrade it every time the new version comes out, and the spam bots seem to work exceptionally well with php.

[jshaffstall]

I'd agree with the comments about Impex. I looked at the instructions when I was converting over from my try at phpBB, and quickly decided it was less hassle to just have the few members I had testing the forum reregister on the new one.

Haven't had any trouble with plugins/products, though. Probably varies based on the particular mix used.

Jay

[patrickd88]

I'm a big fan of phpBB and run two forums with it. It's nice, has a pleasingly design and updates fairly easy.

The downside is that since 3 came out, there have been few mods and every time you update, you have to check and make sure the mods didn't 'break'.

Patrick

[JeremyMorgan]

I just recently installed 3 on my site, and decided to go with 2 because the .htaccess was conflicting with the setup I have on the main site. But it looks very promising. I'm not saying phpbb is perfect, but I definitely prefer it over vbulletin. Simplemachines is pretty cool too.

I like the fact that with 3 I can make my own templates easily. For SEO you want to have clean validated templates, something that has been a challenge with phpbb2.