[Webdork]

XMB is terrible! The worst thing about it is all the infighting amongst the development team. I ran it for about a year, then switched to phpBB.

PhpBB is nice and cosmetically I like the look - but once I hit 25,000 members and around 100,000 posts the board starting timing out and having major problems - posts disapearing etc. ie as soon as the db got over about 50Mb it ++++s itself.

I now have to have auto prune running to kill dead threads over 90 days. Im still running phpBB and am still a fan, but if I had to start again i would indeed use VBulletin.

I run VBulletin on several other sites and the performance is noticable better and much more stable at higher levels of traffic - and this is on identical boxes.

The number of hacks for VBulletin and the size of the developer community makes it well worth spending the $$$ - but only if you are running a serious site.

Id still recommend people start off on one of the free boards, get their feet wet so to speak - and then Upgrade to Vbulletin when performance requires it.

Just my 2 cents.