[SmashinYoungMan]

I have extensive experience with SMF. My site, www.spacebuffs.com used to have a SMF forum, and my other site, www.ageofantiquity.com still does (not for long, though, as it is about to get its own vB upgrade and facelift).

While I think SMF is the nicest of the free forum solutions, it still can't touch vB, in my opinion. Creating skins, adding mods and the like are much more of a pain with SMF and, worst of all, updates are slower in coming, leaving it open to security exploits for longer periods.

That said, it beats vB if you're a Joomla CMS user, as there are a couple of mods which allow easy full integration with Joomla.

With all the above said, the nicest thing about using vB is that many web denizens are often very familiar with it before they even visit your site, widespread as its use is. This makes them much more likely to register to your forums. SpaceBuffs has gotten more action in a week using vB than it did running SMF for almost a year.