I'm looking into starting a forum. Nothing major, just a simple forum. No huge requirements needs. I'm looking for a free option that is easy to customize/theme, simple to operate and maintain, and has most of the features people have come to expect in a forum.

I've been doing some research and I think I like both simplemachines and vanilla.

Any reviews of either or both?

Any other suggestions?

I haven't found much comparison of the two in my searching, so I'm looking for benefits/pros/cons/problems of each.

Thanks!

I've heard some good things about vanilla and MyBB, personally I use phpBB3 and haven't had any problems with it, the admin interface is fantastic!

Why don't you use IPB 1.3? Its free.

Because IPB sucks :)

Try out MyBB, it's great and much better to skin and customize than IPB or SMF. Vanilla is great, but not quite the same and not as feature rich yet as other packages.

what's the site for ipb 1.3? I can't find it anywhere.

mybb and smf look like the frontrunners out of the box, feature to feature. Something is attractive about vanilla, though. I don't know what exactly it is. Perhaps I'll try all three to see which one i prefer.

you should go with Simple Machine F.

You can still find ipb 1.3 out there but you will have to modify it with some important patches if you find it. And its a pretty beefy patch too.

Another alternative thing you can do is to just go to one of those free forum sites and create a forum. But I find those iffy.. esp when you need to do a db dump.

I would second Simple Machines. It is neat and it works great. Though you can be on the lookout for phpbb3, it seemed to be far more secure than its predecessors phpbb2. Another worthy of consideration due to its huge base and corresponding huge number of plugins and mods.

Why not give deluxebb a try, its a free open source bulletin board. Its not very well known of but it is a great little board. Very fast light small forum board, I was looking for a nice little forum to intergrate into a project of mine and stubbled on this one and I haven't looked back. It is NOT one of the most fully featured boards, but that is what gives it, its appeal. Its very easy to customise and the team are very nice people, infact I am currently helping out development.

www.deluxebb.com (http://www.deluxebb.com)

I also run this development version.

www.killapix.com/deluxedev (http://www.killapix.com/deluxedev)

You won't be disappointed with SMF, it's reasonably easy to customise, albeit people often look at the template files, see a bit of _very basic_ and run a mile, in reality it's just as easy as any other system with the benefit that what you learn about basic php will help you a lot more in the long run.

It's also pretty efficient on resources (I can say that with a board with 4 million posts, > 2500 users online in 15 mins on a single fairly low end Pentium D 920, 2GB ram.)

I like PHPBB free forum software. That is good forum software and very poular one.

Definitely smf from me too.

I've decided to go ahead and try smf. I've uploaded it and installed it to forums.powermonster.net. It's nothing fancy, but it will do for now.

I just use Vbul myself but i have used Simple Machines in the past and it does the job :)

Why don't you use IPB 1.3? Its free.
Why waste your time with outdated unsupported software?

MyBB, PunBB, and Vanilla for sure and no paid forum beats vBulletin

I personally don't like SMF, phpBB, or IPB.

Simple Machines Rocks, I'll prefer

Looks like is using SMF, but my vote will always go to MyBB.

I'll take a look at deluxebb killapix. That is one I haven't heard of yet.

The Blake Board just moved over to SMF, and is it ever an improvement.
http://ablakeforum.com/index.php?PHPSESSID=i546npdg6ejm32s382ei4sd230&board=1.0
It seems like every comment left by users was about a positive impression, and I had to agree.

best wishes, lloyd

what was it before?

We switched one of our largish (4000 members +) community forums from vBulletin to myBB six months ago. Not because we`re too tight to spend the yearly fees, we wanted a much lighter package. vBulletin is way too bloated for our needs, so we figured a much lighter bulletin board would be better. Funny thing is, of all the "free" boards out there, myBB resembles the closest to vBulletin - well at least in my opinion. Best decision we ever made. All the admins, mods and members are happy with it. We don`t want all these fancy bells and whistles, just a nice board for chatting and showing off photos etc. It sure cuts down on server resources too.

We switched one of our largish (4000 members +) community forums from vBulletin to myBB six months ago. Not because we`re too tight to spend the yearly fees, we wanted a much lighter package. vBulletin is way too bloated for our needs, so we figured a much lighter bulletin board would be better. Funny thing is, of all the "free" boards out there, myBB resembles the closest to vBulletin - well at least in my opinion. Best decision we ever made. All the admins, mods and members are happy with it. We don`t want all these fancy bells and whistles, just a nice board for chatting and showing off photos etc. It sure cuts down on server resources too.
I love what you did! :) MyBB is a great script! :agree:

i try MyBB ;) i hope that its good
thakns for all comment ...
and i request a few questions.
there is any example of MyBB site...
please...

i try MyBB ;) i hope that its good
thakns for all comment ...
and i request a few questions.
there is any example of MyBB site...
please...

ep2.nl runs MyBB :agree:

One of my clients was asking what the "cool" looking forum software was called that we recently switched to? I told him mybb - within an hour he was back and asking if I could help him convert from his IPB forum.

And as for us, been many months now since we switched over from vbulletin and we haven`t looked back.

Yes, I am also looking for IPB 2.3.1 to MyBB converter, but I think, there is not converter available this time :(

I`m not sure, but I did it the long way around. We went through Impex. IPB > vBulletin > Mybb.