What's the best forum software/hosting site?

[Ummon]

Yes, I am thinking of unleashing my full evil upon the unsuspecting citizens of the net....and am curious where I might base my operations.

Thoughts, preferences, speculations on where is/might be good?

[RayB]

Well, phpBB is good, but seems to always come under fire of hacker exploits. This board runs SMF and seems to be fairly solid (right Saint?).

VBulletin's a good one too, but will run you about $90 a year.

[MonMotha]

phpBB2 was trash.  phpBB3 is decent, though the code is still a little ugly if you plan on hacking up your site's installation.  phpBB3 hasn't had too many security problems (no worse than the others, really).

SMF isn't bad, but it doesn't have the following (and therefore support/mod base) of phpBB.

VBulletin is not bad, but I don't think it's worth paying for over phpBB3 or SMF.  There's also IkonBoard and Invision Power Board.  IkonBoard is ancient and total garbage near as I can tell.  I don't have much experience with IPB, but some people swear by it, or at least did back in the phpBB2 days.

[Ummon]

Cool, thanks.

[Dr Zero]

I have been with Lunarpages for years and have never had a problem their prices are good and they give lots of free software all you have to do is turn it on and use it.
They have popular forums and if you are into photography they have picture album software also.

http://www.lunarpages.com/

APS Script Library     Included
4images - Image Gallery    Included
b2Evolution - Blog    1 click installation!
AdvancedPoll - Polls    Included
Coppermine - Image Gallery    Included
SMF Forum - Forums    Included
cubeCart - Shopping Cart    Included
Drupal - Content Management System    Included
eGroupWare - Groupware    Included
FAQMaster Flex - FAQ Builder    Included
Gallery - Image Gallery    Included
Joomla - Content Management System    Included
Magento - Shopping Cart    Included
Mambo - Content Management System    Included
Moodle - Course Management System    Included
nmsguestbook - Guestbook    Included
Noah's Classified - Classified Ads    Included
OpenIT - Inventory, HelpDesk,    Included
osCommerce - Shopping Cart    Included
phpmyVisites - Web Statistics    Included
phpBB - Forums    Included
phpBook - Guestbook    Included
phpWiki - Wiki    Included
PPhLogger - Web Statistics    Included
PHPList - Newsletter    Included
Serendipity - Blog    Included
SugarCRM - Customer Relationship Management    Included
TikiWiki - Wiki    Included
Wordpress - Blog    Included
Xoops - Content Management System    Included
ZenCart - Shopping Cart    Included

[RayB]

The reason all those are "included" is because those are already free software packages anyone can download and install on whatever hosting they want.

[Dr Zero]

The reason all those are "included" is because those are already free software packages anyone can download and install on whatever hosting they want.

Sure they are but its nice they have it ready for you with one click so you can try it out some of these I had never heard of but having them there is convenient.

Just makes things easier for new users and if you dont want to use them it doesnt take away from your space.

[SavannahLion]

phpBB2 was trash.  phpBB3 is decent, though the code is still a little ugly if you plan on hacking up your site's installation.  phpBB3 hasn't had too many security problems (no worse than the others, really).

Have the phpBB gained more experience or did they just have a change of guard and better versioning control?

I ran a phpBB board and spent nearly a solid straight month doing a security audit with the code and server. One bock of 30 lines I rewrote using intrinsic functions and got it under five or so. My admin sent the patch back the phpBB people and I got a message a week later from one of the coders expressing surprise that such a thing was possible. 

I don't really blame the phpBB people though. PHP is an atrocious inconsistent language with a naming convention that's all over the place. Toss in the nightmare from hell magic quotes and you're bound to ---fudgesicle--- any beginner coder up for a few years.

[Ummon]

One bock of 30 lines I rewrote using intrinsic functions and got it under five or so. My admin sent the patch back the phpBB people and I got a message a week later from one of the coders expressing surprise that such a thing was possible. 

Funny.


Well, I decided to go with something easy and free, and in this case apparently somewhat new: Lefora.com

Except for one sorta small snag (a visual element), it's pretty point-and-click-and-up-in-minutes, has a lot of different visual features to choose from, and supports everything I think here does. Most of the stuff Dr Zero mentioned I'm not, and likely never will be, interested in.

A bonus is that the beginning of the domain name is whatever you decide followed by '.lefora.com', which shouldn't be too hard to remember.

[MonMotha]

phpBB2 was trash.  phpBB3 is decent, though the code is still a little ugly if you plan on hacking up your site's installation.  phpBB3 hasn't had too many security problems (no worse than the others, really).

Have the phpBB gained more experience or did they just have a change of guard and better versioning control?

I ran a phpBB board and spent nearly a solid straight month doing a security audit with the code and server. One bock of 30 lines I rewrote using intrinsic functions and got it under five or so. My admin sent the patch back the phpBB people and I got a message a week later from one of the coders expressing surprise that such a thing was possible. 

I don't really blame the phpBB people though. PHP is an atrocious inconsistent language with a naming convention that's all over the place. Toss in the nightmare from hell magic quotes and you're bound to ---fudgesicle--- any beginner coder up for a few years.

I think part of the problem phpBB has is that they insist upon maintaining compatibility with ancient PHP and MySQL installs.  Lots of shared host providers run some really old ---steaming pile of meadow muffin--- on their servers, and they refuse to upgrade for some reason.  This means that lots of the PHP intrinsics aren't available, and it also means they can't use InnoDB tables which would get them (*gasp*) constraints.

But yes, they do have better version management and modularity, now.  They've switched to SVN and seem to use it a little more.  Their codebase has a lot less copy/paste and a lot more function/object breakouts.  I think phpBB3 was also written with security in mind as it was a complete rewrite from phpBB2.  PHP "best practices" have also come a long way.

And yes, PHP is a pretty awful language.  It makes it far too easy to shoot yourself in the foot.  I can't believe the amount of crap in phpBB just to deal with whether register globals are on or off (they should be OFF!) and whether magic_quotes_gpc are on or off (they should be OFF!).  phpBB unfortunately has to deal with all these old warts since, for similar reasons people often can't upgrade their PHP or MySQL versions, people often can't modify their PHP global settings.

[Ummon]

Incidentally, I ditched Lefora, because while I liked the basic layout, it had stupid things like a post rating system, and I had to go into the CSS code to access that. Plus, the ubbcode wasn't working. ??

So I just went with a phpbb3 hoster, and so far so good. May check out SMF if that don't work out.