I have a potential customer that wants to use YaBB. I have heard some bad things, but have no other clients using it, so no real experiance with it.

It is a brand new site, and would start with no users, so it should be no problem to start. He plans on pre-paying for one year though, and is afraid I will get mad at YaBB and cut him off and take his money.

My question: 1)How bad is YaBB, and what would you recommend I do with allowing this.
2) If his board gets too popular in 6 months, and I have to close his account, giving him normal rate for those 6 months, and giving the rest back would be the correct thing to do, right?
3) What would you suggest for other free bulletin boards. I recommended he go with VB, but he says that costs too much.

Thanks.

YaBB is flatfile database driven and when he gets enough users it can be a pain on a shared server. I would suggest you your user to grab phpBB or if he really wants CGI tell him to look into iKonBoard. Its still a flatfile database but its less resource intensive than YaBB.

I'm a UBB user that recently changed to Vbulletin... Quite a no of host banned UBB & YABB on their servers. (resources intensive)

What i know is that www.ikonboard.com is doing quite fine and is less resource intensive. At least no host has banned it YET. Ask your client to stay away from YABB and try ikonboard. It is FREE as well and is much better than YABB from my point of view.

Thanks, since it's a new board, I don't think he will hae a problem using another board.

Is there an echo in here? :P

I'll second the recommendation for phpBB. I run it on one of my sites. It is less resource intensive and has better features too. It is also free. :-)

since both are Mysql backed whats the real difference bet. vbulletin and phpBB - infact at times phpBB seems faster to me ????

vBulletin has a couple of features that phpBB does not have. phpBB has all of the important features however. Yes, phpBB is fast.

Another big difference: vBulletin cost. :-)

I find that PhpBB is the best alternative to YaBB, perharp you could recommend you client if his hasn't learn about it.

YaBB is fine as long as there are not many visitors to his/her website. You may want to ask how many concurrent users to his site you are expecting first before proceeding.

qasic

Originally posted by kwimberl
vBulletin has a couple of features that phpBB does not have. phpBB has all of the important features however. Yes, phpBB is fast.

Another big difference: vBulletin cost. :-)

When testing phpbb, I found the biggest difference was in the admin side of things. This wasn't all that recent, maybe 4 months ago, but I felt it was unsuitable for a board of this size, fine for smaller forums. It lacked many user tracking and extras that I use in the admin side, but overall can't beat the price! :D

I have to agree with Chicken (and I'm part of the development team for phpBB :D )

phpBB is nice and fast, but it does not have all the bells and wistles that VBulletin has. OTOH, it has been out less than a year.

I think it can handle volume pretty well. I'm the administrator for a board with over 23k posts and almost 1000 users. That board is just running on a plain old shared server (Pearl Harbor the fim - Fan site (http://www.behindfilm.com/pearlharbor/phpBB/)).

Frank