Recommended Forum Software

[rdegler]

What forum/bb software does Hostgator recommend?

I am worried that pphbb is frequently hacked and am considering punbb, a nice light text-based forum.

Thanks

Roy

[Rockoids]

Originally Posted by rdegler

What forum/bb software does Hostgator recommend?

I am worried that pphbb is frequently hacked and am considering punbb, a nice light text-based forum.

Thanks

Roy

Well this forum uses vBulletin, so I suppose they recommend it -- it is commercial.

My personal preference is MyBB, which gets necessary security updates, and thus is quite secure. It's also lightweight, meaning that it works great with a large membership and posts on a shared server. And it's free.

And, yes, I use it.

See www.theparacast.com/forums for an example of my implementation (I have a dedicated box, though). You'll notice I have a Quick Theme feature (bottom right) where you can sample several themes.

[Sam]

I don't know about HG. But i recommend vBulletin

[Rockoids]

Originally Posted by Sam

I don't know about HG. But i recommend vBulletin

I switched from vBulletin. I hated their technical support, which was uniformly rude and obtuse. That's a commercial product. You pay annually for support after the first year, and they don't earn their keep.

There are good free alternatives to consider ahead of the commercial options.

[rdegler]

rockoids your forum looks nice. I am playing with it on opensourcecms.com.

My two concerns are security and not worrying about overloading the cpu or bandwidth. I do not want to find the board shut down by HostGator for violating the TOS

roy

[rdegler]

Sam,

At this time I am going to choose a free forum package. I am setting up the forum for a organization of librarians.

roy

[Rockoids]

Originally Posted by rdegler

rockoids your forum looks nice. I am playing with it on opensourcecms.com.

My two concerns are security and not worrying about overloading the cpu or bandwidth. I do not want to find the board shut down by HostGator for violating the TOS

roy

That's what makes MyBB a nice alternative. In some ways, it's similar to vBulletin, though less complicated, and our members prefer it.

Also, that particular forum, the one on The Paracast, has 15-20 mods and multiple themes, and uses between 2.6 and 2.7MB of RAM. Not bad, eh?

[Keith W]

I agree with Gene (Rockoids), MyBB is an excellent forum software.

In fact it was Gene who put me onto to MyBB in a roundabout way, I had seen him mention it on another forum and as I had never heard of it thought I would check it out.

I had set up a test board as was very impressed, I eventually converted all my forums over to MyBB and haven't looked back since.

It is certainly worth giving MyBB a go

[kmaw]

MyBB has become my new favourite...

[Rockoids]

Originally Posted by kmaw

MyBB has become my new favourite...

I'm currently playing with a rough, rough version of the forthcoming MyBB 1.4 (legit version folks, ) at a rarely visited board (www.rockoids.com/forums) if anyone wants to try it. Theme adjustments aren't in the Admin panel yet, even, but it works nicely.

[Eric]

I'd have to recommend phpbb3. I haven't had any problems with it (no spammers, spam bot registrations, etc.) so far and it seems to have all the features of the commercially available ones.

[RainbowViper]

Freeware? phpBB.
Payware? IPB.

[candonetwork]

PHPBB3 - you just can't beat the community support. Easily customisable and very stable.