[SaintDog]

Well after being a user of many of the free boards and UBB, I have to say vBulletin has paid off, even though I have not all the way figured out how I want it to look - I am working towards something nice and different.

As FireFly said, you will never get the support you get from a paid product over at one of the free boards websites. They may act like it but I do not feel that those working on the free boards care whether or not it is complete, popular, or if you have a problem installing it, after all, it is free, what all do you expect? They do work on the boards, but do you see too many changes that make a difference from version-to-version? I sure don't.

I will take iKonboard for instance, sure it hit it off with the incorportation of MySQL into the board, but the fact is, it is still CGI based and it is still slow and a resource hog (now more then ever, imo). Also, not that I want to get into a big argument over it, but more problems go on over at Jarvis/iKonboard than you know about, enough said.

Other boards such as phpBB and XMB are great boards to an extent, but they are a bit buggy. The last release of XMB that came out had a huge security leak in it to where you could get the database information (username, password, db-name, location, ect) right on the board just by entering a string into the URL. I believe it has been fixed, but it took about a month, who knows what happened during that time .

Down to the ever pop...uhh....UBB - Sure, it (at some times) can look nice, but at what cost? Even more stress on the server and slower loading. Flat-file based boards can not compete with SQL bases ones, especially ones with SQL/PHP. Now UBB has OpenTopic which unless you are rich, is crap, on a crap server. It is basically UBB being run on Oracle, not much of a difference, still slow. Onto UBBThreads, well they decided to make, well buy and re-code a small bit of an already made board (used to be WWWThreads). It is PHP/MySQL based, yet it is more expensive and InfoPops support is horrible. I think I e-mailed them for support and they got back to me about 2-3 weeks later (is this really support??).

Anyway, the bottom line is, vBulletin is not expensive considering the already mentioned:

- Support
- Features
- Ability to edit almost everything
- A great deal of hacks/addons
- Friendly staff
- Speed!
- ect.

It is the best, of course I know opinions differ, but if you do not like vBulletin you don't need to be here (of course, if you are planning on getting it, stick around ).

Ok, I have typed enough