Looking for Bulletin Board/Forum Software

[allendick]

I'm looking fior some really good, flexible forum software to replace phpBB, so hopefully, the software would have available a conversion script to convert the existing phpBB dB.

The software need not be free, but free is nice. The software needs to have a much better user interface than phpBB, since the forum as over 24,000 historical posts, 50 sections, including private sections, and typically 10 to 50 new posts each day.

Basically the main weakness of phpBB is the lack of a good way to obtain all the last so many days of posts without hunting around, and a lack of user choice regarding threading, etc.

An ability to use the forum by email like a mailing list instead of having to use the web for reading and posting would be nice, too.

Any recommendations?

allen

[Jim]

The one that gets my vote is vbulletin. It's probably the most complete and secure php based forum in existence, but does cost. I think the cost is $80 for a yearly lease or $160 for an owned license. I checked out one called panfora yesterday that appears to be more of a compiled daemon, and quite a bit more expensive. This page has a pretty good wrap up on the most actively developed and used forums - Forum software

[allendick]

Thanks, Jim

allen

[cmyksteve]

Hi Allen,

I switched over an old phpBB board to SMF, by Simple Machines, and was very pleased with the transition. This was a small forum, so I didn't think it was worth mentioning as a possible solution for you.

But this morning I was listening to the Joomla Juice podcast and thought I'd pass this along. The Joomla users forum has now reached 100,000 members and they're using a Simple Machines Forum. The last half of the Joomla Juice podcast (episode 13) is an interview with Brad Baker who's the forum Admin and he has a lot of good things to say about SMF.

[allendick]

Thanks. Looks promising.

allen