[Gene Steinberg]

Originally Posted by iogames

The whole point is that vBulletin is the Best! Capish?

Well, here's the deal: I have played with half dozen of these forum products, the free ones and vBulletin. phpBB is available everywhere, but it is feature poor. Try, for example, to get a true Contact form mod for phpBB 3. Maybe there's one now, but vBulletin includes that as part of the standard install.

I tried SMF, and I like it's features, but the interface is poor. For example, by default signatures appear in a smaller typeface, even though one's customized signature is an important part of community involvement. For the new SMF version under development now, I tried a Contact form add-on, but it only works on the default theme, and that's true with most of their "packages," or mods. You have to hack them to make them work for most other themes, even the extra ones that come with the default installation. They have a good installation setup, however, but some poor decisions about the design were made early on.

MyBB is a free vBulletin knock-off, with a good feature set. But my brief involvement as a beta tester in their upcoming 1.4 version showed an incredible degree of incompetence and a lack of maturity on the part of its young development team (lead programmer is 15). I actually had a decent-sized MyBB forum, and underwent a little pain migrating to vBulletin, because of bugs in MyBB.

That forum can be accessed at http://forum.theparacast.com, if you want to try it out for size, particularly if you find the subject matter of interest. It has 12 mods, a decent number of template alterations (minor) to customize the look and feel to my obsessive/compulsive standards. I don't know a lick of PHP, but did 95% of this myself with little difficulty, and asked some mod developers for advice and code for the rest. Feel free to see how things function from a member's standpoint, and try free forum software, too, if you must on test boards and then decide.

I'll never go back to free, at least for this sort of thing. If you depend on a forum as a part of your business activities, the price of a vBulletin license isn't terribly high in the scheme of things. Nor are the annual renewals. Here in the U.S., a couple of tanks of gas gets you a vBulletin license.

Peace,
Gene