Teen Internet Marketer

There are four main pieces of software that people use when making forums. They are: vBulletin, Invision Power Board, PHPBB, and SMF. Looking at all of these pieces of software, it’s confusing to pick which to use when there are so many. Over the next four days, I’ll rant about each one. Right now, I’ll talk about them in general.

IPB and vBulletin are the more expensive forum software. They are closed source, but open to modding. Therefore, you can mod IPB and vB, and there are many mods for both. Both use AJAX for editing, and stuff, but in my opinion, vBulletin implemented AJAX in a better way. Also, Invision Power Board has been getting more security holes and bugs recently, after 2.1, so that 2.1.0 was a unusable release.

Therefore, out of IPB and vBulletin, even though IPB used to be better, as soon as they released 2.1 and vBulletin released 3.5, vBulletin 3.5 is definitely the winner. I am keeping my Invision board at 2.0, because that is, in my opinion, their best release, as 2.1 is totally messed up. Flame me all you like for that.

PHPBB and SMF are free bulletin board software under open source licenses, that is, you can do whatever you want with them (within reason). I’m not a lawyer, so don’t take my word for it. But, they are free, and pretty good software. PHPBB has more people who use it, has a larger mod community, but has less features, and PHPBB 3 has been delayed for two years. SMF has more features, and is rising in popularity quickly. There are less modifications for it, but it has more built in features.

Stay tuned for a more in-depth analysis of all four forum software!

Related Posts

• Invision Power Board
• SMF forum software
• PHPBB
• vBulletin
• Note to Auto-Updating Software Developers:

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