In your opinion what is the best free forum software and why? I know there are more out there than on my list so feel free to leave comments but I tried to only include the ones I see as the leaders at the moment.
MyBB definitely, if I ever would need to go back to free software, MyBB would definitely be my choice. I love the themes, and the good amount of plugins available. The support is great too.
I use MyBB and i am loving it! It is so user-friendly but when the time comes, i can go into my coding mode and change heaps of stuff. The options are unlimited with MyBB. I find that it comes up to standard with VBulletin if you know what you are doing! Just my opinion though
I am going to vote for MyBB the community support for the software is amazing. You can find almost any paid mod on another forum for free on MyBB.
I have always liked MyBB. It seems that it's hard for even some paid systems to over do it. Not only is the user side of things easy to use but also the administration side. Some forum systems just have annoying administrative control panels.
I'd have to vote phpbb3 it's limitless to how much you can customise it to do what you want and it has an awesome development team and has gone from strength to strength okay MYBB is good for all the free vBulletin fanboys but I would say the development team is a lot stronger and larger at phpbb and when phpbb4 comes out I think we're all going to be really surprised and pleased with the results.
The best free foru software, in my opinion is SMF. However, the VERY best forum package is vBulletin. It just has so many styles and is very costomizable, however I never used it on any of my own forums.
Sorry I'm all up for freedom of opinion and stuff but I find it hard to take this seriously! I mean serious? It's the one forum software where development seems dead there hasn't been an update for the software in like forever and it's probably by far the most limited software out of all the others I hate SMF and would never, ever use it ever again in my life I think it feels and looks badly amateurish.
I am a vBulletin fan but for the freeware version I like phpBB more than any other. In my opinion, it is easy to install and maintain. I never used myBB but I heard people saying that it is difficult to install and maintain and requires more time to install plugins.
SMF is defently my favourite free forum, because as it says in the name , its simple to use and its easy, has plenty of options to choose from, Why not PHPBB? Because simply, its terrible, It's trying to hard to be VB when it aint, it looks like vista which we all know is terrible and it's also got pretty much no spam protectino built into it
I'm using SMF because I have only one forum and I found a youtube video on how to set up a forum. I did not know what MyBB was until I found this thread. Is there a way to easily install MyBB if your host uses CPanel?
I'm using SMF free software on one of my upcoming forums (still in development stage) and I'm still trying to figure out how to put google adsense on the site so that it shows up in the right place, like beneath the post comments and not just a banner at the top of the page. Right now, that's my only gripe. I think there's some kind of ad plug in manager that makes this easy. I modified my SMF theme post template today with a code I found online to ad the adsense and it didn't parse right and the forum disappeared. Thankfully, I had a back up on Notepad. Back to looking normal now, still no Google adsense ads.
I voted for MyBB which in my opinion has the easiest admin/mod control panel (I've also tried phpBB, punBB and some others I can't recall their names now) @moneymakingmom, did you manage to make it? If you want help, send me a PM, and I'll give you my email to send me the file and the adsense code
phpBB and MyBB. They both are the best free forum softwares out there. SMF is too buggy to my taste. PunBB is simply outdated. I vote phpBB and MyBB (if thats possible)
I'm so glad I found this thread. It saves me at least a half hour of research time. I've been wanting to find a free forum software for awhile now. I just hope these are web-based and I don't have to mess with file uploading. I can learn that but I am hoping it's all web-based. LOL
I was recently researching free forum software. I'll have to take a look at myBB and give it a try. I'm not ready to purchase anything yet, only test it to see how capable I am.
