By chadchandler on
I'm about to add a forum to my Drupal site and I'm curious as to what everyone uses/recommends.
I thought about Phpbb, or Vbulletin, but I want to use "user points", and award a point per post instead of the typical "user posts", it would say "Total Points".
What forum do you use and why? Whether it be default Drupal, or Vbulletin I think everyone would like to discuss the best forum system to use on a drupal site.
Comments
vBulletin is best
In my opinion, vBulletin is orders of magnitude superior to anything else out there in terms of usability and features. Unfortunately it seems in the past that the Drupal community has been hostile to anything that wasn't "invented here" (i.e. that is not part of Drupal.) That further unfortunately means that the Drupal community doesn't seem to openly support integration of vBulletin (or any other forum), which is a real shame. As "No man is an island," so too is no CMS.
About vBulletin integration
About vBulletin integration in particular, there are licensing issues with GPL since vBulletin is commercial software. But there is this project:
http://www.vbdrupal.org.
You can find bridges for integrating the users with phpBB, SMF and other open source forums between Drupal's modules. I don't have any strong opinion for either one of them.
http://drupal.org/project/phpbb
http://drupal.org/project/smfforum
Hostility or friendliness don't matter much as long as someone decides to write the code. There are no assignments or prohibitions. Homemade Drupal code is no exception to that. Well, perhaps using or not using the code could be called friendliness or hostility but people have their own reasons. Anyway, the code is there now.
Simply put, if it is important to give your users a familiar forum experience out of the box get SMF or phpBB. If it is important to have all the content accessible throughout the site to recombine and present as you please then use Drupal's forum and take a look at this check list for some of the missing bells and whistles,
http://groups.drupal.org/node/1780
Anyone ever used the UIE
Anyone ever used the UIE Forum?
http://drupal.org/project/uieforum
Since nobody who has been
Since nobody who has been using UIE answered so far, I will tell why I didn't even try it and correct me if I am wrong.
UIE does have the feel that forum users expect so that they know where to find what, which is good. However, it doesn't use Drupal's node system, it uses its own tables, and from that I can also assume that some of its other cool features such as private forums, also don't use node access but their own methods.
So, although it is a Drupal module, I am getting the impression that it is not exactly integrated but rather "attached" to Drupal. That makes me compare it not with Drupal's forum but with phpBB and SMF.
RE: About vBulletin integration
Actually, hostility or friendliness does matter because it determines the amount of support the community will provide in terms of developing and maintaining the integration. I looked at Drupal several years ago and that hostility turned me off of Drupal at the time. I've since met some local Drupal advocates and that's what made me decide to look at it again. When I last asked about vBulletin integration I was told to use Drupal instead; they wanted to know what features Drupal needed and wouldn't even consider the fact that Drupal forums was not a viable solution for my needs at the time.
As for GPL issues, I'm pretty sure that an integration project would have to be GPL but not the software with which it becomes integrated. If integration with commercial software were a problem then you couldn't run Drupal on a Windows server!
Anyway, looks like there has been some more pragmatism in the Drupal community since I last looked, as evidence of the projects you mention. That's a good thing. Zealotry is never pretty.
...
You are missing the point. It's not hostility (your claim). It's lacks of interest and a different viewpoint.
Using an integrated forum means that you have an integrated user base, you have integrated content and you have an integrated search for your entire site. This is a holistic approach to building a site.
If you believe the integrated forums + contributed modules is lacking, then an effort to improve that would be more beneficial to both the Drupal community and your site in the long run. If you are not interested in improving the tools developed by the community, then those active support members will often wish you luck and move on as supporting other projects for free isn't interesting to most.
Your attempt to claim that this is 'zealotry' is interpreted as name calling and an attempt to shame people into helping you, which irritating and annoying. Annoying people in a volunteer support community is not a way to win support for your cause.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
sigh too
>> You are missing the point. It's not hostility (your claim). It's lacks of interest and a different viewpoint.
Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe, the results the same. If they truly didn't have the interest, why respond to the post? Responding as they did was just antagonistic.
Frankly, now that I've looked at Drupal and it has had two years to mature, I think it is mostly really good except for the forum aspects. My reasons for bringing this up was to denote that such viewpoints when people respond in an unhelpful manner makes people with needs feel like their needs are marginalized and their perspective considered irrelevant. And that's no way to win friends and influence people.
>> If you believe the integrated forums + contributed modules is lacking, then an effort to improve that would be more beneficial to both the Drupal community and your site in the long run.
That's the exact comment one of the people made before, which totally misses the point. That's like you saying "How can we make our sports car better" after I tell you "I need a pickup truck." The reality it the two are so far apart its not even a reasonable consideration, and it marginalizes my need and makes me feel my perspective is considered irrelevant.
>> If you are not interested in improving the tools developed by the community, then those active support members will often wish you luck and move on as supporting other projects for free isn't interesting to most.
I'm not asking this to be snarky but isn't that a lot like saying "Well if you don't do it my way I'll take my toys and go play elsewhere?" The point is Drupal can't be all things to all people in all cases. Just because someone has a need that Drupal doesn't support but that something else supports really well doesn't mean that person isn't willing to contribute to Drupal it just means that that person knows how to be efficient and not recreate the wheel.
>> Your attempt to claim that this is 'zealotry' is interpreted as name calling and an attempt to shame people into helping you, which irritating and annoying. Annoying people in a volunteer support community is not a way to win support for your cause.
You mean you interpretted it as me name calling? Why are you taking offense? That was actually my way of saying that your first reply was much better than I got several years ago. I wasn't name calling at all and I wasn't saying you were acting like a zealot but you are taking offense nonetheless. It's up to each person to decide if they want to act like a zealot; for those that choose to act like a zealot I was simply saying their behavior was not pretty.
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Well, gosh.... Maybe they were trying to help you. Your mocking my answer is an interesting response. You evidently hold them in disdain for not answering in a manner that you expected and think this type of response helps your case? Would you have also complained if no one answered you in the same manner?
Drupal is contributed to by people solving their own problems. It's not a features race. There is no road map. This is on purpose and has worked well for 12 releases. People contributing code and features to scratch their itch.
Yes. It is like that. Most people here are very Drupal centric. It's about a holistic view of building a site and long term experience with the sites Drupal builds. Just because some forum has features doesn't mean it's a good overall fit to integrate into a site. You lose out on integration benefits, complicate maintenance, upgrades, statistics. MOst don;t see that cost long term as worth it.
Drupal didn't evolve as a 'best of breed connector' suite. It evolved as an integrated CMS. Both the community surrounding it and the code written. That has a huge effect on the attitudes and practices of active contributors.
There are people who have worked on bridge modules. You can find them in the downloads page. It's not that it's wrong, it's that it is in general not interesting to most of the active community for the reasons I outlined and therefore you will find very few people doing that. Most people after a while end up end up migrating their forums to use Drupal forum + add on modules and themeing.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
I'm not arguing 'a case'...
I'm not arguing 'a case', but it seems you are?
And that was not mocking. The phrase I used is frequently used to denote a the use of different terms that are effectively the same, and that's they way I meant it. You seem to frequently take thing personally when they are not meant to be. Please don't read negative connotations into my writing; I will be explicit it I ever mean to be condescending.
Never said anything contrary to that.
I completely appreciate that and their position. What I was lamenting was the antagonistic attitude towards anyone that has a need that does not fit that Drupal-centric world view. It's ironic to me that you seem to be saying that Drupal people have a right to their Drupal-centric view yet you don't allow others the right to express a conflicting viewpoint.
I have absolutely no problem with people not working on things when they don't find them interesting. What I do have a problem with is when those people actively seek to antagonize or silence people whose world view does not align with theirs and I have an issue it whether its related to Drupal or when its related to religion and politics. The reason I complained was that the people who asked for integrations were chastized for asking to integrate. The appropriate response for those who don't find integration interesting would be simply not to comment on those requests once the questioner makes it clear that using Drupal by itself in not an option for them.
BTW, the "Drupal is an island" attitude is very unfortunate because from what I've seen so far Drupal is technically without peer. The web is a large place, and isolation is generally considered a poor long-term strategy; just look at the economy of North Korea.
Oops, sorry
Sorry, I assumed you made the original comments which is why I said that your reply was better than I got before. That was my mistake as I see now you only replied to my comment and not to the original person asking the question.
Gosh, and I hate for this to come across as snarky because I don't mean it to be, but the fact I can't see all recently prior comments when replying (which is why I made the mistake) is one of the literally hundreds of reasons why the forums modules in Drupal can't compare to vBulletin.
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Then don't be snarky.
Submit code that adds/modifies the behavior of the comment module. Just because you have an interest in a particular use case doesn't mean anyone else does.
We're not trying to compare with or compete with vBulletin. It's not a race or a competition. It's people working together collaboratively to build a CMS that accomplishes their goals.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
Why the unitary solution?
Why the unitary solution? Is the only appropriate behavior for people with needs to redevelop functionality that already exists elsewhere? Especially when that functionality is comprised of tens of man years and has excellent functionality and 3rd party support? Maybe I'm misrepresenting your position, and if so I apologize, but if not do you realize how ludicrious that position is?
Why in the world should people be expected to develop forum functionality when there is already a tremendously excellent forum in the form of vBulletin? It's just crazy to expect me and others to reinvent the wheel when a really nice wheel already exists and only needs an adapter created to bolt onto my preferred axle. Why shouldn't people (like me) instead focus on offering functionality that fits their expertise and their needs, and that provides functionality that is both not in Drupal and not really anywhere else? Wouldn't that make much more sense?
As a matter of fact, that's exactly what you were saying the Drupal community does; focus on their own needs. Why is it okay for them to focus on their own needs and not okay for me and others?
Erm, just because you don't have an interest in something doesn't mean no one else does. Case in point, I can find many people on Drupal.org who have asked for vBulletin integration and integrations to other web apps.
Never said you were trying to compete or compare. What I said was that many people here generate a significant amount of vitriol whenever someone asks to integrate, and just as it diminishes the person who criticizes another, it diminishes the Drupal community when it is not more accepting of other's needs. And once again, that's a real shame.
I owe the Drupal Community an apology...
Steven: After responding to this post and having an ongoing dialog with you about this issue I decided to revisit the vBulletin-related posts in which I participated back in 2005. My negative reactive to the comments made on that thread where what turned me off to Drupal, and my faulty memory was that many people were negative. However, I re-read everyone's response just now and found everyone who commented to have been cordial with the exception of one person: you. It was your comments that I felt were caustic and no one else's, so I owe everyone else in the Drupal community an apology.
Further, I stand by my comment where I said that I would be explicit if I were going to be critical. Your post is what turned me off to Drupal several years ago. The person had a real problem and you attacked him for it. Comments such as this are very unlikely to gain new converts to the cause of improving Drupal which seemed to be the cause you champion. And your dismissal of my concerns as being like a sales pitch for vBulletin further alienated me from Drupal.
In closing, my intention is to get to know Drupal well and to support it in the ways I can. When I choose to become an expert in a platform I have been known to contribute significantly to it. I certainly hope, however, that you can be introspective regarding my criticism and we can work to improve Drupal in our own respective ways instead of maintaining an acrimonious dialog.
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I spent time in the other thread explaining the various answers and outcomes of those threads and it was obvious the poster in question was starting off with a chip on his shoulder. I said it was ok for them to use it. I provided a number of approaches in that thread to solve his issue, including using a CMS that may better fit his need for vBulletin.. Drupal is not for everyone. His inclusion that "we're" not improving things fast enough to suit him was in fact part of his demand and criticism.
In this thread I outlined careful the reasons for why there wasn't much interest or activity on other forum integration / bridge modules and mentioned they could be found in the download section.
Toe-may-toe, toe-mah-toe may be a common phrase where you are from. It's certainly one I hear occasionally and when used is used as a method to completely dismiss the other persons words as nonsense and of no value. Maybe it's use is a locality thing that doesn't translate well in the Internet.
As to a sales pitch comment. It is something you have to buy. Robert had asked for features which you did not respond to.
If you want to use it that's fine. If you want to work to develop a bridge, that's fine. My comment in this thread was explaining the reason why such efforts don't seem to attract long term developers here. I never said there wasn't interest, (I even mentioned them being in the downloads). I indicated they never seem to last long. Whether a project lasts long is a consideration for using a given approach when building your site.
Drupal is Drupal centric. That's just a historical trend. It's an important trend to be aware of and understand if you are building sites. If you or someone else can get enough people together to get a vBulletin integration thing going then good for you. I just haven't seen that happen. The closest living example is the Gallery bridge which was funded by a group and then left idle for a long time. Going down that path is fraught with technical challenges that can break your site or cause you to run an insecure version of Drupal. Check out the Gallery issue queue. Anytime a new version of either project is released, it breaks.
To close, I will borrow your own phrase.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
A REST-based Integration API is what's really needed
He was frustrated. I respectfully viewed you as having more of the chip on your shoulder than him. Please don't attack me for saying that, I'm just relaying to you my impression.
Let me quote him and disect what he said:
He was asking to understand how to run vBulletin alongside Drupal. He was frustrated because what he saw other people told was to run the Drupal forums and not even acknowledge that they had a legitimate reason for wanting to use vBulletin.
What he wasn't saying was that people should build anything special for him. His comment about the community not building the Drupal forum fast enough was not him demanding that the community build it faster, it was his way of justifying why his desire to use vBulletin for his forum was legitimate. That's a key and important point; when the community delegitimizes many people's questions about how to integrate it makes other people feel it important to justify their questions up front as legitimate.
I feel certain that if the response was instead "We really understand your needs and we feel you pain, but unfortunately there currently isn't a reasonable way to integrate Drupal with vBulletin" he would have accepted the reality and made his decision what to do next without feeling frustrated. I know I myself would have felt completely different about such a response. Such a response leaves open the possibility that maybe even he would pursue integration. The response he got instead made it very clear that not only would be not get any support in doing an integration, the community would likely be hostile towards it.
Regard customer service in companies, which is analogous to community support of open-source software, studies have shown that customers who complain and had their complaint acknowledged but not corrected still end up being more loyal than those who never needed to complain. On the other hand those who complain and get treated disrespectfully become vocal critics of a company, often for life.
So his last sentence above was not a demand, and if it was a criticism is was a keenly applicable criticism. How do I know this? I read (most of) the same posts he read and I felt exactly the same way he did. That is why I think you were responding with a chip on your shoulder because you interpreted a justification as a demand.
Be that as it may, I would hope that we could view this as water under the bridge, and that you could accept as reasonable that people might have legitimate needs for integrating other applications into Drupal.
Though I didn't mean it as disrespectful, you can clearly see how you felt about what I said. That's the same way I (and I'm sure the original poster) felt about your comments on the 2005 thread.
Drupal is also something you have to "buy." With your time. Everything is. Sometimes spending money is a better use of one's resource than spending time. And that's certainly often the case for using vBulletin vs. developing the same functionality for Drupal.
I was tempted to reply with "It will be easier to tell you which features that Drupal does have in common with vBulletin than to explain which ones it doesn't." For me to properly answer his question would have taken me hours to research, and to what end? Drupal was not going to achieve parity with vBulletin for my needs in any reasonable time period (two years later it is still not even close) and it was clear that the vocal members of the Drupal community weren't interested in even providing more support for a vBulletin integration, so at the time why bother?
Further, the very fact you bring that up tells me you still are fundamentally unaware of my point regarding vBulletin. You can't duplicate everything about it in Drupal that makes it attractive. That's like me saying I want a visit Italy and you quizzing me about what I like about Italy in a bid to make our country more like Italy instead of simply telling me how to get a passport and accepting that Italy has things our country will never have.
Respectfully, when you started with the following you drowned out most any residual value from your remaining comments:
There's an old saying: "You never get a second chance to make a first impression." The first impression you gave in that thread was hostile and that colored the rest of comments on the thread.
Let me explain why that perspective, if adhered to religiously, will be very short-sighted. As the web evolves much of the interesting software is becoming services instead of open-source software, and many services will have data that Drupal simply can't incorporate. If the Drupal community chooses to continue its insularity and doesn't put mental energy into integration functionality then Drupal will become less and less appealing overtime. I don't actually think the Drupal community will be that short-sighted, but I do think there will be a lot of time wasted in debate prior to the more vocal in the community coming to the realization that the world really is changing and the world view they held dear is actually damaging the community.
You may view services like Facebook or Flickr as being different than vBulletin, but there really is little difference. If you choose to view vBulletin and Drupal as simple being web services that need to be integrated then all of a sudden this isn't as contentious an issue as it seems to have been in the past. There is huge value in building bridges to other islands.
My favorite book ever, New Rules for the New Economy says it brilliantly; "The quickest way to grow your network (in this context, the Drupal user community) is to connect it to other networks (i.e. integrate with other web apps and join together their respective communities.)
I understand your and other's reaction against integration. I can definitely appreciate the challenges; my 20+ years in software development have left me with a keen unstanding of the issues. However, what I would advocate is to delineate those things that you would feel you would loose when there is integration and turn those things into an integration API that (at least all PHP-based) web apps could potentially use for integration. And ideally it would be a REST-based API and not at the PHP or SQL level, but a PHP/SQL integration API would better than nothing. If the core members were willing to incorporate a REST-based integration API I'd be willing to help design it (I've been off and on rest-discuss for almost a year) and I'd be willing to use it to develop integrations. I might not be able to do it quickly, but I would definitely work on it.
You really can get the best of both worlds, you just have to be open to it. Actually the Drupal community is one of the only communities that would have the momentum to make this work.
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At the time that was written there was a series of extremely hostile ranting / venting / attacking posts on drupal.org from people attacking the community in this context (no, not discussions, out and out attacks). So yes, while you are seeing one post, you are missing the context of several very long hostile rants in other threads during that same time period (which is also why the poster choose the phrasing he did as well). The first impression I got of the original poster was negative. I see your point but at the time there was a lot going on that don't make me regret that post, as irritated as I was, I still provided information which lead to a good discussion and I believe this.
As to features of vBulletin, I've never used it. I am not sure Robert has either. Someone who is familiar with it will need to lead the feature effort. What you deem as important is not necessarily what someone else deems important. So asking someone else to do this comparison will probably not result in an agreed upon goal. You may visit Italy because you like language, good food and wine while I am interested in how the aqueducts and fountains worked and evolved.
In any case, no new features will be added to core for Drupal 6 due to the freeze, so any feature matching will need to be accomplished with contributed modules or planning for Drupal 7 when that branch opens up. For all it's development speed, Drupal core changes more slowly then those not involved with or following it realize. Seeing the end result of some features may seem like it was instantaneous but was code 18 months in development.
The biggest lament that occurs after many get Drupal + Gallery site setup is they can't pull the content into their site using the content tools in Drupal. This is unfortunate because Drupal had nothing to offer as an easy alternative to it. Acid Gallery is reported to be a decent module (haven't used it) though not as feature rich as Gallery but with the advantage of integrated, accessible content. I have seen some insane sites leveraging views, image_cache and theming as well. It depends on your needs and what you can and will contribute.
Drupal is all about APIs. Most forums aren't. They are about user authentication. Flickr is about an API. I understand that Facebook, etc are exposing APIs to code against and leverage. (There are people doing that) That's a little different then user authentication bridging. The other issue to tackle is how the content is leveraged. Does the api allow for the content/information/files to be pulled into the Drupal node system? If so, can the content be leveraged and integrated into a site. User authentication bridges don't allow that. So, api goodness yes, user bridging not as interesting to most (again, your needs may vary) so less long term developer interest.
People start using Drupal all the time and add their needs stamp on the community if they stick around long enough, work on it and develop their reputation in a given realm. All it takes is the investment of time and effort.
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide -|- Black Mountain
-Steven Peck
---------
Test site, always start with a test site.
Drupal Best Practices Guide
(no title)
Heh, a fellow clipperhead! I have that book -- I used to struggle with eval( bCodeblock ) and cargo back in the day.
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I do feel better myself in a friendly environment, but as I explained no community assigns or prohibits a task to a developer. Development and maintenance is assigned to persons only by themselves. This is I think the key point which someone coming from outside does not get at first.
The only point you may have here is that the community can make a project look more trendy and prestigious by talking highly about it, which may motivate a developer. But you can't tell people what opinion to have...
This rings a bell. When I first join a while back I did think "Why are they doing, trying to reinvent the wheel while there are tried and true forums out there?" It was a reasonable argument but later I found out that it had a flaw. There is no "they" when it comes to writing code. Only when it comes to opinions or needs, but this doesn't get you much.
Yes, I know, sometimes this sounds like zealotry especially if they don't ask anything about what you need. But there are people, developers even, who ask these questions seriously because they are working on it.
It is not as simple as that. You can't distribute Windows, packaged with a product of yours, and GPL's virality creates additional subtle points even for distributing only parts. Too much has been discussed about the licensing issues, such as whose functions are allowed to call whose function and many other details that I don't want to know.
Pragmatism? Where? Ah, you mean the code.
Thanks for the thoughful reply
Thanks for the thoughful reply.
Just a point of clarity; I'm 100% aware that open-source is developed by and for people's own needs, and I completely respect that. I have no and would never have expectations that someone will develop something for me or for someone else just because I want it. What I've had a problem with was the attitude towards needs that are outside Drupal.
So it appears that if
So it appears that if somehow overnight Drupal's Core forum was an exact clone of Vbulletin, nobody would be upset?
Would it be fair to say Vbulletin is probably the best option for a developer seeking scalability & features?
If you were creating a Drupal community based website, and you were asked to select a forum . Rank the top 3 you would use.
Example.
So it appears that if
Assuming it supported all the vBulletin third party solutions and was maintained in 100% parity with vBulletin, then yeah. But that's essentially impossible without integrating.
Actually what I'd REALLY like to see would be additions to the core designed explicitly to make integration with practically any other web-based app seamless and easy while maintaining the benefits of Drupal. IF there was a will by the Drupal team to add generic integration functionality into the Drupal core I for one would be more than willing to work on integrations for vBulletin, MediaWiki, and WordPress.
The current state of affairs is that practically every open-source web app considers itself to be an island and doesn't put much thought how to build bridges to other web apps and that is a huge source of pain for many users. I run a local web entreprenuer group with almost 300 members and many of us lament that reality. I know that for those of the Drupal-only persuasion the idea of integration is anathema however the first descent open-source CMS that puts major efforts towards integration will achieve significant growth in users and frankly I'd like that CMS to be Drupal.
Better yet, if the various open-source projects could come together and form an integration standard for web apps, it would be better for everyone. We could even help promote it via the fledgling Simple Web Services initiative if developed as a set of REST-based web services.
I hope to see that day come to pass, but I think it's going to require a significant amount of vision on the parts of many.
That said, to answer your question:
1. vBulletin (for most cases.)
2. Drupal (in limited cases.)
3. (for me, there is no 3rd consideration.)
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If you mean clone the user features and the classic forum look and feel of the dedicated forum software, as a ready-to-use Drupal profile out of the box, then I think everyone would celebrate -- evidence that this is desirable are the druBB Drupal group, several Drupal modules being developed to implement some of these features. and several proposed Drupal features in the issues queues.
If the Drupal's forum was a nice but unintegrated package, keeping its data and layout separately and controlling them with methods different from the rest of Drupal, with a well-maintained bridge for user and session integration, that would be something outside the logic of everything else in Drupal and I guess a lot of work would be going on now in the direction of integrating it back to Drupal.
Well, I frankly don't know. I have seen claims about the scalability of vbulletin compared to phpBB and SMF but they always seemed anecdotal to me, with no hard references, or mention of the platform on which each one was run or what kind of forum it was. For example I was looking at this http://www.thejemreport.com/mambo/content/view/294/ and it seemed like a very anecdotal review.
Depends. If the forum and nothing else was the heart of the community, and I was relying on the familiar branded forum look to attract and keep people, I would choose
1. SMF or 2. phpBB (except if someone gave me good reasons for paying -- I have none).
If the forum was only a part of the community activities (for example if I had blogs, groups, image galleries, events...) then Drupal forum with a look similar to this:
http://www.ubercart.org/forum/general_discussion/267/flatforum_garland
well... maybe with a less unfortunate choice of colors.
Which forum to choose?
Hi,
I have been using vBulletin, SMF and phpBB for more than 4 years.
Most of the time i get angry to phpBB, because using it is a pain in the butt. :P
Here is my favorite list for forum world.
1- phpBB rules
2- vBulletin polishes.
3- SMF follows.
phpBB :
It is a full Open Source, do what ever you want on it. Customizing and finding/writing
suitable/reliable plug ins for phpBB takes time . But it is fully fully customized, especially
phpBB 3 is a baby rocks and rolls.
I recommend phpBB for geeks, hippies, Debian users, professionals etc...
Example :
http://www.gaiaonline.com/forum/index.php
It has more than 10million users, 1.2billion posts.
Woavv
vBulletin :
The best commercial forum system, no comment!.
I see it as a follower of phpBB especially for determining what kind of the plugins to use
inside forum system. It is relatively difficult to customize, as your needs.
I recommend it people who need commercial support. Organizations who hires less people
for their forums vBulletin is the best outsource. Every time vBulletin team will help you.
If you are newbie a good step to learn and build pro forum systems.
Example :
http://forums.offtopic.com/
It has more than 180000 users and 92million posts.
SMF :
Creative Commons, in which you need to keep their copyright. Because of this your forum
will always have their tag on your page. I am not against what they do, and i am not against
using their copyright tag, but i do not prefer to see some kind of message that i cannot change
while building my site(ie i made a forum to be seen on top part of a page, then some content
at bottom, but users have to see other company copyright at the middle of every page).
I recommend it to people who does not wanna pay to a commercial forum and who wants to use
a forum without many installation and mode selection/installation problems.
I used 5+ versions of SMF and see no such errors. I trust their forum quality. Every feature that SMF has
can be done by phpBB and vBulletin.
Example :
forum.joomla.org has 150000+ users and
http://www.redandwhitekop.com/forum/ has 3.6million posts.
My favorite is always phpBB. 6 years ago i had my own forum system but last 4 years
i use phpBB as a forum basis. If customers are not tech savy i recommend SMF and vBulletin.
Kind Regards