Ok. Tell us in your opinion which forum/BB script should one choose to use and why ?
Giving the reason is as important as voting. Please include:-
Which script has best features for normal users/visitors.
Which script has best features for administrators.
Which script can best handle medium to heavy load sites.

As I have never been the owner of a forum, I can only speak from the users' side regarding the message board programs. I have participated in discussions using vbulletin (obviously), phpBB, discus, and UBB. It seems that many of the features are the same with these programs, and much of the way the board is presented depends so much on the way the owner has customized it- it's difficult to compare apples to apples. My personal opinion is that when all else is the same, go with price- therefore I voted for phpBB.

hth
-Elizabeth

it's difficult to compare apples to apples.

I think you meant to say it's difficult to compare apples to oranges

I would use phpBB, though vbulletin looks good too, but I've never tried the admin interface for that.

I used to use ikonboard, but as it wasnt written in PHP then (and I think it's still not in PHP now), I eventually switched to phpBB.

Originally posted by laserlight
I think you meant to say it's difficult to compare apples to oranges

Maybe I should have clarified because what I meant was, it's difficult to compare the two in an "apples to apples" way, because they can be so different.

Oh well, whatever- you get the general idea LOL
-Elizabeth

I prefer to make my own. That way, I know exactly what the end result is, what bugs it has, and how to integrate it seemlessly with my site.

LOL... If I knew what bugs my programs had (aside from the ones I put in on purpose, of course), I'd be a very rich man!

$phpBB = ditto -> Elizabeth;

i run a fairly large site... 20k members and growing...

i have found VB to be VERY slow, and requires much database optimaization of tables on a routine basis. it's my least favorite board system out there.

I have found phpbb to be completely unstable. It's crashed on my more than once. I won't go back to it after loosing 200,000 posts, and 15,000 member ID's and having to re-up the nearly 50MB of data.

wwwthreads is just to simple, as is Phorum. reminds me of 1996 BBS's with color.

and going back to the whole free thing- my vote goes to invisionboard.

Their templates/skins are hard to manipulate if you have safemode on, but other than that, a simple tar ball upload, extract, and bam- new theme. Their admin panel is great and super secure, requiring a new auth every time. They have support forums for both skins at ibskins.com. and a HUGE db of modifications at ibresource.com

20,000 members, 90,000 posts, 3 months being up on invision, and i have 0 complaints. The only bug i have found is that sometimes it gets greedy with server memory, and causes a php error due to fatal memory allocation. a simple refresh gets it going again though. Mind you, im also running an RC version, not the latest release, as I haven't had time to do the latest upgrade they released.

Ive downloaded a couple. Not to use for a site. But to see which i like and take a feature here and there and use it on my own Forum im planning on making one day.

Anyway.

vBulletin. Seems ok. But very costly. And i do agree with briansol vBulletin aint a very good forum, when you start getting 1000's of members. Sometimes PHPBuilder wont load for me. But i go to the site itself and its fine.

PHPBB. Seems ok, but if you want to make your own Theme, it takes a lot of patience to learn the system. And if i didnt know some PHP id probably give it a miss.

InvisionBoard. Havent really played with it, but without a doubt must be the secure forum ive ever seen thats free. I havent played Admin enough to give it a fair response. But if your after security, and it being Free, without a doubt id use it.

Moving onto make your own. Like i said im planning on one day making a forum. (I already have but heh cant have themes on it).

Although forget who keeps saying it, but i dont see why recreating the wheel is such a bad thing either. In a sense you know exactly how to use it. What features are where. How secure it is. And its free. The bummer bit is, doing it by yourself can take a few months before anything like a forum can start to appear.

If your not after making your own Invision Board is probably best. But vBulletin seems to be a very popular one and is relatively easy to template. But i guess its personal opinion.

Hmmm...interesting... as of the date/time of this post, no one has voted for vBulletin...

probably because all those who have voted are cheapskates

vBulletin sucks, and any board that would use it is not worth the screen it's printed on!

In fact, I would never be caught dead using a vBulletin-created board.

So there!

Originally posted by BuzzLY
vBulletin sucks, and any board that would use it is not worth the screen it's printed on!

In fact, I would never be caught dead using a vBulletin-created board.

So there!

BuzzLY, dear, if you post much more like this and happen to be slated for EVA simultaneously, you may not be able to retract your tongue (or your cheek) unless your thermal generator is really up to snuff....

Hmm, interesting point, Piersk...I hope this post doesn't get lost!!

Ok, I'm going to pretend I know what you just said and say...

LOL

Something along the lines of "it's cold in them thar spacesuits, so when you're speaking tongue-n-chic, beware of freezing your lingual organs...."

Originally posted by planetsim

vBulletin. Seems ok. But very costly. And i do agree with briansol vBulletin aint a very good forum, when you start getting 1000's of members. Sometimes PHPBuilder wont load for me. But i go to the site itself and its fine.

Jupitermedia sites get hit extremely hard by spiders. We fight them off as much as possible, but get two or tree ruthless ones hitting you at the same time and any board is going down.

As far as 1000+ members, I work with several vB forums, the two biggest being this one and Flashkit. On FK we have 414,000+ members, with over 409,000 threads (1.6 million posts) and it's doing fine - with the exception of spider invasions.

We have 95,000 threads - equating to 95,000 pages - here on phpb, so when we get spidered, the ruthless ones are trying to grab as many of those 95,000 pages as it can.

I actually had to throw together a script to limit pages to 1 page per second on FK - but we put out 1.2 or so million pages a day. I never have a problem loading pages here. If you wanna email the staff alias when you do, please feel free and I'll check the logs at the time that the email was sent.

You allowed to say any more than that? Which spiders are the worst? How do you suggest fending them off when necessary?

If you've no time, or it's a stupid ??, no problem...TIA!

Originally posted by dalecosp
You allowed to say any more than that? Which spiders are the worst? How do you suggest fending them off when necessary?

Ok, to be more accurate: it's ruthless harvestors and offline browsers that do the most damage. I used spiders as a blanket term.

90% of the time it's not a spider we've heard of and the offline browsers seem to be spoofing the User-Agent. The professional ones will normally limit to a page every second or two.

Fending them off; We ban their IPs from either the server or the network ultimately. Half the time they are behind a masq, so they aren't the only one's losing connectivity, but it's less than the amount that would if we didn't ban them.

Interesting. I've never thought about the impact of, say, the Wayback Machine, for example. Although they might qualify as 'professional'... that would be a system with a huge appetite for content, though, I'd imagine...

Thanks for the info

Wayback Machine doesn't spider whole sites (specially for big ones) and they spider only once in a while.

Anyway, another question:

Which board is the easiest to integrate so that a single login will work on the whole website and easy to have a userlevels or permissions based system.