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Need to pick forum software for a site
I have been sitting on wedonotsupport.com for a year and I want to go ahead and launch it as a software review site. The site would make the most sense to me as a forum since I want to make it a community repository of information rather than an Oflameo circle jerk.
I am hosting the forum on a vps but the vps will be shared with other sites.
Comments
UseBB or one of those Futaba things.
ya punBB, phpBB, fluxBB, any of those. Just don't use vBulletin.
Anything other than phpbb, always seeing that thing get hacked.
OpenBB? That was the shit back in 2000 before it disappeared!
PHPBB https://www.phpbb.com/
Different than OpenBB.
Reread. Reparse. Comprehend.
Compute. ERROR.
I haven't used it in a while so I don't know if it's still good, but I used to like Simple Machines Forum.
SMF was the easiest to integrate into anything!
@WSS
If (!empty($openbb))
{echo 'OK!';}
Try SMF or phpBB.
http://vanillaforums.org/
XenForo is nice
BurningBoard https://community.woltlab.com
if willing to pay xenforo, free smf or vanilla
I'd like http://flarum.org/
Discourse and Nodebb are more modern alternatives (just likes flarum)
In my opinion the leading forum software at this moment is https://invisioncommunity.com/ (PHP). It has pretty much all the features out of the box you can ask for and has great support, there are a couple of sites running IPB with millions of registered users and posts. However it costs a lot.
Free alternatives are MyBB (PHP) which is pretty good or NodeBB (NodeJS) if you're a fan of NodeJS.
XenForo is nice
XenForo is really nice.
Very different than my experience:
Support is responsive - no complaints there.
IPB is not bad forum software by any means. I just found it expensive and more complicated than others.
Anything but Vbulletin. That thing is on life support and is living off its old reputation.
Was Invision the software that killed VPSboard by trying to look too much like Facebook? I don't remember. I like ultra oldschool, non-threaded forums with not much styling. LET is not too bad.
Agreed. Top-Down just parses normally. The whole reddit perl-hell bullshit drives me insane, and the REALTIME RSS TWATTER FEED POPOVERS make me even crazier. This design is simple enough and provides all that you need in a theme.
It's a shame the markup (haw) is such shit.
Flarum is indeed a nice forum system, I'd recommend XenForo if the OP is willing to pay.
Flarum looks awesome.
I'm on a forum using that. I'd say it's the most irritating setup I've encountered for any forum. Perhaps it can be configured to be usable, I don't know. It does seem stable.
Are you’ve aware that Vanilla is the shitty software that powers LET? It barely works (polls broken, etc.), frequently crashes and is rather vulnerable to exploitation.
Vanilla isn't stable.
phpBB 3.2 is a lot different and modern than previous versions, but still not "there".
SMF rocked big time way back (what I use on FR) but its development has stalled for years. It's not modern. But it's very stable, owing to its "tested for years" code.
NodeBB is all the buzz right now, but it's not very feature rich. It has a bright future though.
vBulletin is dead.
XenForo is alive. It's built by previous developers of vBulletin, and is in active development. Big sites that used vBulletin have all moved to xenForo.
InvisionPower has a very stable history and is in active development, however you may need to buy modules separately.
I haven't tried others recently, I don't want to comment using several years old knowledge.
Can vouch for NodeBB, good free alternative. The prices seen here https://nodebb.org/pricing are only if you want to pay them to host it for you
You can get it setup here if you want to try it out
https://github.com/NodeBB/NodeBB
Another less known but decent free option is EsoTalk here https://esotalk.org/ plain with not a whole lot of addons but good functionality and it gets the job done just fine IMO
Not that I tried it, but Discourse looks really modern and fancy. You can use it as a self-hosted forum as well.