I’ve been toying with an idea for a bulliten board for quite a while now, targeted at a specific audience in the Orthodox Jewish community. I got a domain and would now like to put a board on it.
I’ve managed to get phpbb installed on it, and it looks OK, so far. Of course, no one is posting yet, so I don’t know how it’ll perform under stress. In reality, however, the target audience is much smaller than the crowd here - I’m not expecting to have hundreds of visitors at any one time.
The attraction to phpbb is that it is free - I’m not going to be earning any money off this board, so I’d like to keep expenses down. However, I’d be willing to shell out for a board that it markedly better.
So far, I’ve seen two alternatives. One is the technology that is used by this very board, vBulletin. The other is Invision Power Board.
Does anyone have any experience with these technologies? If so, can you post your experiences? What was good about it? What was bad?
I use Invision (ver. 2.1.x) at my site. Both vBulletin and Invision are pretty similar, with only what seems to be minor differences between the two (although I do like Invision’s IP tools better than vBulletin’s, while vBulletin has slightly better search options).
I like Invision a lot and, barring any future extremely poor coding on their part, will stick with them for at least the next few upgrades. Their anti-bot and spammer image challenge is somewhat out-of-date, but I understand that should be fixed in version 2.2, the next upgrade (which should be along any time now).
Both Invision and vBulletin will allow you to create user groups, hidden forums, ban filters, custom permissions, etc… Both allow for reported posts, but Invision seems to have better moderation tools (i.e., under each poster’s name–not seen by the poster him/herself–is a scale listing all warnings he’s received). I don’t believe vBulletin has anything similar, although I’d welcome a correction on that point. Also, both boards have quite the dedicated communities; in addition to quality help forums, there are numerous skins and modifications available for each.
I also have used, and still do, phpBB for a more personal site. I set it up out of curiosity and haven’t been very impressed with its lack of set-up, moderation and administration features. And, I seem to recall it lacking thread and forum-tracking options, although I don’t have it front of me right now to verify that. For what it does do, however, it does it well. I’d also like to try out Simple Machines Forum, another free board software. Looks pretty nifty.
Wikipedia has a page showing numerous board software packages out there, as well as some feature comparisons/contrasts. Take a gander to see the various boards out there.
I just installed a copy of Simple Machines Forum (latest RC version), and I already like it better than phpBB. At first glance it seems to have a lot more options than phpBB, including better thread and forum tracking as well as improved user groups and rights.
I installed SMF after an attempted upgrade screwed up phpBB. It has some really nice features and a pretty good stab at an easy-update feature, although since it’s just used for me and my friends to post crap on, it doesn’t really get stress-tested. Handles attachments and images much better than phpBB did, that’s for sure.
Thanks SkipMagic and everyone else. I downloaded SMF and installed it. It installed like a breeze and seems to have quite a few nice features that phpBB doesn’t have.