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Best Free Forum Software?
Offshore_Solutions
Member
in General
1) What, in your opinion is the best free forum software?
2) Do you know someone good at forum software I could hire to transform an old vBulletin forum to a new free forum software?
3) Who is the least expensive PHP freelance coder that you know of?
Comments
Do you have a data integrity plan for the PASSWORD and other credentials first?
Flarum.
While still in Beta it's quite stable and NPM gives it a lot of wiggle room.
I've been using DVBBS since 2006.
It works well on ASP shared hosting running in pirated Windows 98, and it can use Access database so that I don't need to buy SQL Server.
If I forget password, I can get it through SQL injection.
If I need server access, I can upload an ASP Trojan horse and run commands as Administrator.
ASP hosting is hard to find nowadays, but https://mzunguhosting.ml/ still has some and their network is very fast.
PHP + https://mzunguhosting.ml/ should give you the highest performance.
As for hiring PHP computer science engineers, I'm afraid they are so smart you'd have to spend some millions for their Wordpress highly technical knowledge.
HAHA 😄
Yes
I am the least expensive freelance coder I know. I charge £1 per hour. But I can't code.
What is the link for NPM forum software?
How do you feel about Simple Machines Forum? https://simplemachines.org/
Smf powers servedez.com
Never had issue. Love every bit of it.
npm isn't a standalone forum software.
For me personally SMF, phpBB etc are all so outdated it's hurting me more than them lol.
Havent looked too much into SMF lately but for phpbb...it's bland, like really bland. Milk v2 theme tries to do something about it but...it's lacking for todays age.
discuz.net
How much do you charge to transfer an old vBulletin forum with database problems to NPM?
How do I find the NPM website?
Again, npm is not any specific forum software, what you are looking for is flarum.org
And I'm not charging anything as I won't do it.
where can i find this npm forum you speak of
I have been using Flarum and Discourse.
But ofc... Vanilla
OP PLEASE LISTEN
I HAVE TRIED AND MODDED SO MUCH FORUM SOFTWARE, IT'S CRAZY
Fuck anything anybody else says:
best thing ever is discourse, hands down, you CAN'T BEAT THIS. It has a lot of SHIT YOUR PANTS type features/plugins/integrations be it for creating discussion or managing a company/blog w/e
paid: ipb/xenforo/vb (still lesser than discourse despit being 'premium')
js: nodebb (A+++++++++++++ GREAT EBAYER WOULD BUY AGAIN )
else: fluxbb/flarum/vanilla/smf/phpbb are the only things you want to look at, anything else and you're really into niches.
Of the two, which do you prefer and why?
What software does Lowendtalk use?
For an import where there isn't a public importer available, but you're looking at at least 100$ because flarum is still "new" (despite being a few years old), one of the main developers is the primary developers of fluxbb (fork from punbb) just does this for a hobby, for real, flarum is still "experimental" until they decide to stop playing. So don't expect a public importer anytime soon, until they settle down and release at least v1.0
You'll never find somebody who does the job with this mentality, think of a fixed price and find someone willing to work under that, hustle if you want,
But to export/import a forum.....
You need to know how both db/forums work, there is no school for forums, you need to examine source/db before you start developing an importer
You got my attention @duckeeyuck and thank you 😊
If you're willing to convert some 2005 vBulletin to Discourse, please private message me how much you charge.
Discourse. Simply because it's much more refined and I'm comfortable with Ruby since it's my go to language.
Requires a little bit more horse power to run and you need a VPS. Harder to run as a example.com/forum (Did it anyways for the lolz) but overall good plugin+theme system also. All the things are there for you to run a forum without installing any plugins.
Vanilla. But a bit customised IIRC.
WOW! I just looked up the price of Vanilla Forum and, besides the free trial version, the low tier plan, Business – is $689/month! (essential community platform)
Does LET & LES really pay $689/month to Vanilla? Maybe they have leveraged some special pricing?
Business Plan Specifications
5 staff users
250k monthly page views
Public or private community
Unlimited members
Moderation
jsConnect SSO
SuccessTeam
Gamification
NO, they use the open source version
https://open.vanillaforums.com/
Ohhhhhhh, that makes more sense
phpbb?
What version of vBulletin exactly are you running?
I can almost guarantee that if your forum is of any reasonable size and you want it migrating to another platform (especially a free one) professionally, it'll set you back quite a bit.
I have had excellent experiences migrating vB3/4 to XenForo and their importers are probably the best you can get without paying someone to migrate your forum.
If you must keep your data 100% intact, vBulletin 5 is the best option... but vBulletin 5 is very unfortunate.
MyBB has a "Merge System" that could be worth trying if you aren't willing to spend a penny, but I would highly reccomend considering a commercial solution.
Discourse, Vanilla, etc. are really good and how forums should probably operate in the modern day but your users will probably not like such a big change in the user experience, and if I can guess at all - if your community has been on vB3 for this long, they are very allergic to change (or just lazy administrators who pushed the problem down the road until it was too late).
It is years now for vB5. Isn't it got better?
I am using SMF for decades (YaBB). Highly recommended.
MyBB forum is dated now and their theme is designed for desktop users only. Vanilla or phpBB better.
We have a few projects of migration MyBB to Vanilla in past and the importer script required to be modified as stops for various error half the way through migration process.
Yes, why not stick to vB? If you don't have too many add-ons it's still great.
Nope! Still trash compared to everything at the same price point and even compared to vB3/vB4.
I assume they are on vB3/vB4 which doesn't even support PHP 7.2.
You can work to make it compatible with future versions of PHP (vBulletin themselves have an internal version of vB3 that works with PHP 7.4, but that'll never be public), but sooner or later it'll fall over and nobody will be willing to fix it.
I disagree that MyBB is dated - they have a much more regular update schedule than phpBB and whilst their default theme leaves quite a lot to be desired, there are tons of very good, free responsive themes for MyBB that work just fine.
Vanilla would be better, but is a huge leap for a forum running vBx for so long.
WOW! You guessed it right that the forum was on vBulletin v3 this whole time. Great guess and thanks for posting. Please will you let me know why v5 is very unfortunate?
I read that vBulletin's support for v3 will end and that made me decide to migrate.
Exactly the same experience here! We settled on Vanilla and there are quite a few data problems with the current database in migrating to Vanilla. For example, the date of birth in vBulletin is 0, which Vanilla doesn't like. I ended up hiring a very good developer to work on fixing it field by field but there's a lot to fix and it will take another week.