Forum Software suggestions anyone ?

[bigredhead]

So.. i'm finally getting to work on my site, and am about to take the plunge and get myself a 100 Gb hosting accnt thru go-daddy. ( for the ebike or Electric Bicycle thing.. )

I have used this forum quite a bit Vbulletin. There is also PhpBB and a few 1000's of others...

Pay for the VB.. or use a free service ?

[Billy Golightly]

Pay for VB. Its a little expensive initially but its is damn near trouble free compared to phpbb and far better IMO.

[350Xhilaration]

It will all depend on what you're expecting to do with the site and how fast you'll grow.

If you're expecting a return in the near future, pay for a solid BB package.

If you think it may take some time to get some cash in, you may want to look at some free suites of BB software and migrate later when you have some extra cash on hand.

I use YaBB for my forums and it has worked well. If you have any computer knowledge, it's easily "moddable" (plenty of pre packaged modules available). I need to upgrade to 2.0 but haven't found the time.

I don't run that much traffic through my site so a freebie works best for me.

Good luck with whatever you decide.

[bigredhead]

Thanks guys ! much apreciated.

I don't expect much traffic at first, mostly myself detailing installs and how-to's.. battery info etc..

I'd like to try the free versions first and get a feel for them, but i know some transitions don't always happen properly and my biggest beef would be to have all the pictures not load on a transition.

I'm going to go take a look at Vbulletin and see howmuch $ it's gonna run me.

Thanks again !

[Pete]

I used PHPBB in the past and have recently ported my site over to SMF. While SMF have much greater admin tools and monitoring, it is a little weak in the private message department. However, I will take that weakness for the ease of administration.

With PHPBB, even with alot of 'humanizer' and other mods installed, I was getting 3-4 spam bot registrations a day, I haven't had a single one since installing SMF.

I'm told SMF is working on the PM system for future releases, so I'm sticking it out with an otherwise great software.

[Billy Golightly]

I forgot about SMF. Actually I'd reccomend that to start off with first. That way you can see how things work out before you drop the $$$ on vbulletin. If you ever decide to upgrade, they have conversion scripts and stuff you can run to import all the users, posts, threads, forums, etc.