: Good message board for a website (e.g. phpBB) Possible Duplicate: What Forum Software should I use? What are the best (and most widely used) Linux-based message board softwares, and

@Sent6035632

We are using an installation of the (commercial) forum software from Woltlab.

We have chosen Woltlab because it provided the best end-user experience in our evaluation. It has a WYSIWYG editor for postings.

While the end user GUI is rather high-quality, I discovered that customizing the forum software was rather ugly; I ended up doing a mix of manual file modifications and changing administration settings in the GUI.

So from an end-user perspective I would still recommend Woltlab; for customizing it, I would not recommend it.

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@Heady270

You should look into bbPress
Its the fastest one available and easily customisable and can be extended with plugins. A lot like WordPress. And you can tightly integrate user tables, login, theme with your WordPress installation.

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@Kaufman445

Try Vanilla. I don't want to list any arguments against phpBB nor do I want to share good and bad experience, just my favorite under-appreciated suggestion.

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@Sherry384

8 Resources for Message Boards (Web 2.0)



phpBB and VBulletin are the most widely used by far.

I found phpBB easy to setup, maintain and easy to modify as well
Never used vBulletin , but I have seen it in use with many hi-traffic sites

Alternative to administering your own BB is to use a hosted version. Trust me the pain in managing a BB will change your mind. ProBoards seems to be popular.

I guess you need to consider what type of traffic you are going to get in to which features you may need in your BB. BB are always going to be targets for security issues, due to there makeup.

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@Mendez628

When I was running my own forums, I found Simple Machines Forum (SMF) to be an excellent forum. There was good security for blocking users and the administration section would always "dial home" to make sure your site was up to date.

There is also a good skinning environment for SMF, with a wide variety of skins out there, both free and premium. The mods/plugin model is well established as well, which allows you to transform your forum into a mini CMS (for hosting files/articles) if you need to go that route.

SMF is free and typically the only "linking" you need is a small text or banner link at the bottom of your site.

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