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vbulletin - What Open Source Forum Applications are as good?

M

macsrules

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 26, 2008
248
0
I really like the Mac Rumors forum application. I know they use Vbulletin and that this probably what I will use on my site but,

1. I know there are a lot of great Open Source Forum Software Applications out there. Please list all the ones that you know about and recommend. Hopefully something that is as good if not better than vbulletin.


Does not matter if they are not open source still list them please.


Thanks in Advance.
 
I've used phpBB but it's quite lacking in sophistication and features compared to vBulletin. Probably in security too. I think vBulletin is well worth its price, but phpBB is an alternative I'm familiar with. Depending on what you are doing, it may be good enough.
 
Well, you'll never get a free forum that's as good as vBulletin. If that were the case, no-one would buy vBullletin.

I would recommend that you try out SMF. I don't really like the look and feel of it, but it's a pretty good program.

Also, yes I have used both phpBB and SMF. One of my sites uses phpBB, the other SMF.
 
SMF is very good for free, it has some nice themes, a couple have been ported over from vBulletin and you can't really tell the difference.

I tried the latest of MyBB for a while and it just got spammed by bots, don't know if they have improved it now.

If your looking at paid then I believe vBulletin is the best, I use it for 2 of my personal sites.
 
Thanks to all the people that posted so far, all these look like viable options. I will need to study these to determine which will meet my needs. I am going to have one for my internal network which I will probably use a really scaled down one as a internal message board and one for my public site.


If you have some more forums, opinions or thoughts to add please post.
 
HaGG said:
SMF is very good for free, it has some nice themes, a couple have been ported over from vBulletin and you can't really tell the difference.

I tried the latest of MyBB for a while and it just got spammed by bots, don't know if they have improved it now.

If your looking at paid then I believe vBulletin is the best, I use it for 2 of my personal sites.
Click to expand...
Yeah. Very good theming system, just takes a bit of getting used to. Same experience with MyBB. To be honest, I don't really like the look and feel of MyBB.
 
Besides vBulletin, I would only use phpBB. Especially with phpBB's version 3 release it's MUCH better.
 
phpBB3

It is much better than phpBB2. It is much more comparable to vBulliten than 2 is.

I personally prefer it to vBulliten because the number of add-ons available (called mods) is incredible because it is open source.
 
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