Free Forum software

[agua]

I know all of you are going to say vBulletin in answer to any fforum software requests - but imagine a world without VB...

Which free forum software would you say is the best?

[MaxS]

phpBB is probably the best free forum software.

[Emancipator]

punbb hands down if you are a programmer.

[Johnny Gulag]

There is bbPress by the makers of Wordpress but it is pretty basic compared to others.

[Xander]

It depends what you want/need. From what I've seen and heard SMF (http://www.simplemachines.org/) is good, I've used it a bit but have heard a lot of people recommended instead of phpBB.

[deronsizemore]

PunBB is good, but I found it a little less user friendly compared to MyBB. If I use a free forum software, it will be MyBB.

[KLB]

I'd agree that phpBB is probably the best FREE forum package out there. Although I'm partial to vB overall.

[Todd W]

I used invision when it was free then upgraded to VB and would never go back

I think phpBB has the most support though for a free forum..

I only run VB though

[agua]

Yeah - I'd like to run VB all the time, but I am trying different niches sites to guage what the level of interest is like and can't afford to keep buying VB for this purpose - so the plan is to use a good free forum software - and if all goes well, then upgrade to VB.

phpBB seems like the one to use, although you read so many horror stories about it, it kind of puts you off.

I'm no great programmer - so punBB is out of the question and I think I have looked at MyBB before and liked that - so I'll try out phpBB and MyBB and maybe write a forum software review on them

Thanks

[Blue Cat Buxton]

I have also used the simple machines forum, mainly becasue of the horror stories that go around about people hacking phpBB.

[deronsizemore]

Seems to be a lot of votes for phpBB. Like others, I've always heard of phpBB being hacked the most. Is this true, or only true if you don't keep everything updated? Seems like a big risk to me to even think of using phpBB?

[Emancipator]

i used phpbb for awhile but got tired of being severely hacked.

[Micha Dugga]

I've used several and can comment on phpbb and simple machines. My take on them is this...

We used phpbb in the beginning because it was easy, free, and lightweight. Didn't tax the server too much, and it had a good support community. These things are all still true of phpbb.

However, we moved away from it because of its seriously terrible security record. Even if you keep your phpbb site updated, that doesn't help because the security issues that were exploited in the past were all on the latest versions. It's not till a widespread hack goes 'round that a lot of updates occur. To be fair, there hasn't been one in quite some time now, and the new upcoming 3.0 is supposed to be really tight, but I don't want to take any chances.

We migrated all our forums over to Simple Machines. It's a bit larger and has many many admin options that can really confuse a newbie, but the power that the administrator has is very impressive. And their security record is sterling.

So, in a nutshell, my two cents would be start with Simple Machines, but if you just didn't like SMF, phpbb wouldn't be the end of the world.