Basically the two wisest and most popular choices and most popular types of forum software are:
1) VBulletin (normally with the Search Engine Friendly URLs). This is what Name Pros uses. All-in-all this adds up around $500 but its worth it over the long-term.
2) Simple Machines, with the SEO4SMF addon, from Webmaster Talks. This is what we use at www.inforum.in
I'd be interested in peoples opinions about this.
Am I missing something else that is the equal of these two?
phpbb is the best free forum, no doubt, their new beta forum - olympus - looks ace, and has a very nice web2.0 style, as well as having a lot of the features of vbulletin (not all, some)
Have you checked simplemachines.org? In my opinion there are quite a few good ones.
Still, I'm obviously not going to bad mouth SMF anyway but I believe one feature that is particularly inviting over other forum software is the Package Manager, so you can easily install a modification (one of my favourites being Bloc's TinyPortal) without having to manually edit.
The only problem is that not everybody believes SMF to be capable (due to it being free), and rather than actually take a proper look, just automatically decide on something else - whereas the more people that check it out, I'm sure the more people will grow to love it, and the more the reputation will grow in leaps and bounds
I will vote for the phpBB with having regular updates and there are so many mods and skins available for phpBb you just have to google it,phpBB is the best for free
vB all the way, and you don't have to have any SEO modifications. Search Engines are getting better all the time, and are able to index dynamic pages just as well as mod_rewrite'ed pages.
In fact 90% of the time I search for things where it would be on a forum un-SEO'ed URL's tend to show up before SEO'd URL's. However there are free alternative SEO hacks available for vB I use Zioints SEO on one of my sites, works great.
Don't waste the money on vBSEO IMHO. We've used zoints SEO for a while now and we haven't had any trouble. I'm always a fan of free software and love the SMF community, but you just cannot beat the quality of vB.
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its not officially supported by the makers no, but it is by the vB.org community. And any critical fixes that needs to happen the original makers do fix.
Unless phpbb has changed the way the mods are done, it can be a real pain. Manually editing the files is a long, boring, and dangerous thing if you do not know what you are doing.
I use SMF on my website, but I also have vBulletin. vB easily has the most features of any forum software. It also has the most mods and templates. I'm not sure where the OP gets that vB costs $500. It's $160.
IPB looks like it is getting better. I'm going to get a license for it.
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but I believe one feature that is particularly inviting over other forum software is the Package Manager, so you can easily install a modification (one of my favourites being Bloc's TinyPortal) without having to manually edit.
