Forum Software

Theodoric · 06-08-2006, 20:40

I recently wanted to ask a technical question about my digital camera, so I went hunting for suitable forums. Anyway, the first one I went to was dpreview, a major digital camera site, but I found its forums so cramped and ugly that I fled. I found this to be the same at other sites and it was only when I found a forum powered by vBulletin that I felt happy.

Now, could it simply be that I am totally biassed towards vBulletin because I'm used to it, or would it be true to say that it's streets ahead of the competition?

**Rob** · 06-08-2006, 20:54

Most layout things come down to the skins applied to the forum, not the forum's themselves. Yes there is a look and feel about the default settings that many maintain with skins, but if you look at many of the more heavily modded forums, including this one, the layout can be extremely different.

Chris W · 06-08-2006, 22:27

I agree with what you are saying- generally, i find VB and phpBB forums the easiest to use, but that may just be because of getting used to them

danielf · 06-08-2006, 22:32

I can certainly relate to the sense of welcome I get when a forum uses VB. It's like putting on an old pair of jeans. I'm not saying it's the full story, but familiarity may play a role.

**Graham M** · 07-08-2006, 07:14

I much prefer vBulletin in the using and running of it to PHPBB, not sure why?

**Rob** · 07-08-2006, 07:23

Out of the box, VB undoubtedly has more functions for the admin / moderator, than phpbb. It also appears to be a bit more secure. That's probably to be expected given that one is paid for, one is open source. phpbb has had a new version under development for some time, which might close the gap.

Realistically though, there are very few forums that run with stock setting, almost all have been tweaked, with mods added both for added functions, or style. Both VB, and phpbb have excellent comunnities that help develop these mods, our own Paul M being a very active coder for the VB community.

**Graham M** · 07-08-2006, 07:25

I'm getting quite good at PHP/MySQL Coding, I recently developed a custom Image Hosting script for the community I run that has some basic hooks into vBulletin, eventually I would like to learn to Mod vB, but I don't know enough about its internal mechanisms yet.

nemesis01 · 07-08-2006, 08:02

I have ran a vBulletin forum for around 4-5 years now, vastly superior to anything else and the template system is awesome. We used to run a CGI based board before that (infopop) and that was awful, no database system, anyway people complained and we switched to VB and have had no complaints since. I just prefer VB for it's simplicity, and from an admin point of view it's very easy to maintain and mod.

Cobbydaler · 07-08-2006, 08:13

I'm a member of one particular forum that uses SMF.

Has some nice features & very clean & uncluttered.

**Stuart** · 07-08-2006, 08:18

Quote:

Originally Posted by nemesis01

I have ran a vBulletin forum for around 4-5 years now, vastly superior to anything else and the template system is awesome. We used to run a CGI based board before that (infopop) and that was awful, no database system, anyway people complained and we switched to VB and have had no complaints since. I just prefer VB for it's simplicity, and from an admin point of view it's very easy to maintain and mod.

I used to run a forum based on custom-written software (written largely by me in Perl

). It was run for a client, and was not publically accessible. It was awful (didn't really have much time to work on it), but not nearly as bad as SnitzBB, which we use at work..

**Paul M** · 07-08-2006, 10:06

If you like vb, but don't like the price, MyBB is an alternative that looks and feels similar.