When your looking for a free PHP Bulletin board, you want something fast, reliable, and a team that works good together. You want good support and fast progess.

Three Bulletin Boards are bringing this to you. One is not... OpenBB (http://openbb.com).


phpBB (http://phpbb.com)
XMB (http://xmbforum.com)
Invision Board (http://invisionboard.com)


OpenBB bans new members for asking basic questions about their software
Proof: http://www.prolixmedia.com/forums/read.php?TID=256#2176

Unprofessional? I think so.

Fast Stats
Number of team members

XMB: 36+
phpBB: 39+
OpenBB: 3 (Two Developers, One Designer) No designated support personnel

With only 3 team members, it's obvious why the project isn't moving along.

Within the past 6 months: Fired / People who quit from a project

XMB: 2 (2 People left due to time committments with other projects/work)
phpBB: 2 (2 People who didn't have enough time for the project resigned)
OpenBB: 12 (All were fired and banned; Names available upon request)[/list]

How can a project like OpenBB survive? It seems like it's just another "script kiddy" project.

Think about it. OpenBB came first, then phpBB.

Current version of phpBB out: 2.0.1
Current version of OpenBB out: 1.0.0

The facts are there. The choice is yours. Make the right one.
If you're looking for a free bulletin board, chose anything but OpenBB. You won't regret your decision.

Have any questions? Send me a Private Message. You'll get a reply within a couple hours.

-Skippy

(P.S. I am not bashing OpenBB in anyway... I think the public has a right to know my shocking discovery.)

Well, thanks for providing this information.

Prior to this post I was not even aware of this OpenBB software. I'm satisfied with my InvisonBoard anyways... :)

Out of those i would choose phpbb. But remember they all started somewhere, maybe with 1 member or 10. Do you know how old OpenBB is?

When I look for a free board i dont even consider how many people are coding it. I download a demo and see if it meets my requirements, and if it has the functionality i need.

Also, i think any board can be a winner if it has the right ideas instead of just being a copycat.

vSector: OpenBB was started, as I recall, in May of 2001.

OpenBB once had a "rip" of Invision Boards theme... but they were contacted and it was removed. (after a week or two)

Also, if you look @ OpenBB's Users Control Panel it looks just like Invision Board...

Also, some more recent news about OpenBB:
*A member of their team was fired today

*OpenBB's Head Developer and the designer are both leaving the project (Announced Yesterday) So that leaves One Developer (who was hired just a week ago) left on the team. They are planning to hire some more people, though. http://www.prolixmedia.com/forums/read.php?TID=1238

PHPBB is extremely easy to use and install. I would recemend that over any other! :D

I personally don't see why everyone thinks PHPBB is so great. I see nothing special about it. I don't like the default theme. The admin CP is nothing great, wBB, iKonboard, and Invisionboards are easy to use in my opinion. They all see to load at the same amount of speed, and only iKonboard is more of strain on the server. All of them install fairly easily, just edit a config file and go to the install page. I don't see what's so good about it IMHO.
</endRANT>

Originally posted by Skippy123
OpenBB came first, then phpBB.
OpenBB was started, as I recall, in May of 2001. Well, that can't be. phpBB has been around since at least late 2000.

Regardless of who started first, however, I would still choose phpBB as it is an excellent script. The great community makes it all the more better.

Inogenius, ALL forums have ugly default templates.

OpenBB was good for a while, back before the current clowns took control.

-Brendan

Inogenius, ALL forums have ugly default templates.

Well actually I kinda like OpenBB, and Invision Board's theme.

now neophpbb has been released
check this out at
www.phpbbhacks.com
in that forum section

Phrozen: My bad.. I thought phpBB came August 2001.

HRBrendan: I agree with you. When the old staff was there (Niels, Charles, Fizz, Cary, etc) it was a pretty good project until Ace (Lindy) took over the project and destroyed it.

Originally posted by inogenius
I personally don't see why everyone thinks PHPBB is so great. I see nothing special about it. I don't like the default theme. The admin CP is nothing great, wBB, iKonboard, and Invisionboards are easy to use in my opinion. They all see to load at the same amount of speed, and only iKonboard is more of strain on the server. All of them install fairly easily, just edit a config file and go to the install page. I don't see what's so good about it IMHO.
</endRANT>


OMG, I finally found someone that thinks the same way!! I hate phpbb. The template/theme system is absolutely horrible (in my opinion). I had nothing but problems adding/installing/creating new themes. Yuck.

You shouldn't hate something. That's wrong. :)

Does phpBB hate you? I don't think so... so be nice.

I use OpenBB and have no gripes with it and will keep using it for the forseeable future.

--Shaun

I like and use phpbb, I had np wrapping it into my current site template system using php. It seems to be based off of UBB that I used to use.

shaunewing: To be honest, I don't even think OpenBB will last very much longer... Their Project Developer/Head Developer annouced an hour ago that Friday will be his last day with OpenBB.. The Designer already quit.

So... only two people left on the team, until Friday...

Originally posted by Skippy123
shaunewing: To be honest, I don't even think OpenBB will last very much longer... Their Project Developer/Head Developer annouced an hour ago that Friday will be his last day with OpenBB.. The Designer already quit.

So... only two people left on the team, until Friday...

Unfortunately I did feel that something was amiss, especially when OpenBB's site was integrated with Prolixmedia.

I will probably keep on using OpenBB for now - especially as I spent half a day last week modifying OpenBB (both templates and code) to fit into our site design.

The OpenBB team may be falling apart, but existing installations will still work just fine. If I come across any bugs, etc. I have the PHP knowledge to fix them so I'll keep on using it - at least until I get around to integrating something else.

--Shaun

Being in the forum 'industry' I've followed the development of OpenBB since it started as BlazeBoard back in the summer of 2000 (around the same time phpBB started up), so I figure I'll give my insight into the debacle.

OpenBB as software isn't that bad. As far as I can see its always been funtional and hasn't been plauged with too many major bugs. However, it's been stagenated in its development for a LONG time. IMO this is because of the maturity level of the team. The people that took over BlazeBoard after the original developer gave it up were young and had NO experiance with professional software development and they seemed to get easily distacted and I watched their team members come and go. They seemed to have a decent, albeit slow moving, team with Neils, fuzz, Ace and the others, and it sounded like development on OpenBB 2 was comming along nicely.

However, then this Sara woman showed up. She ruined everything by convincing Ace (Lindy) to take over the project, abandon the GPL and all open source licencing, and dropping their entire staff. She made amazingly rude comments toward phpBB and the whole open source community. She made overtly racist remarks about users of OpenBB that couldn't speak english and tried to apolgize for that fact in their posts., and overall killed their entire community. She created a total fiasco with her comments and never apologized for them...she seems to hate me and the entire phpBB team because we didn't delete a topic on OUR forum where a couple users had made disparaging remarks about OpenBB. Overall I think she's nuts... :)

My only hope in all this is that someone takes the last release of OpenBB that was put out under the GPL and continues the project. We need more great free board out there so we can knock vBulletin off their high horse :D

My $0.02...

I am not a phpBB fan either.. Don't see where it compares to Invisionboard!

I'd say invision phpBB and XMB take top spots in that order.

I use like and moderate a large invision board (~10800 members) and its always fast with low server usage.

phpBB is great, but it is too hard to make custom themes.

XMB is also excellent, but it lacks some of the professional elements that phpBB and invisionboard posess.