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modo77

modo77

modo77

Soldato
Joined
31 Aug 2004
Posts
3,658
Location
Sol System
Hi,

I'm currently making a site for my lotro kinship and I need a forum for it. Could anyone suggest a decent one I could use? I was about to try the vbulletin one, but just seen its not free. Any decent free ones? Also if its best to buy one which would you recommend?

Thanks
 
Easy to install, but a little harder than phpBB to configure. When I first used it I found the permissions system a bit of a pain. But it's worth taking the time to learn though.
 
I'd say phpBB (for a free one). Mainly because there are hundreds of perfectly good, easy to install mods to make the forum do what you want (phpbbhacks.com).

Craig.
 
The problem with phpBB is that...

1) It gets spammed to death by bots.

2) You need to hack the hell out of it to get it to do what you want (which can cause problems with upgrading to the latest versions etc).
 
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Apparently MyBB is very good as most of the extras are plug-ins.
I've used PunBB before and I think it's quite good, and version 3 is coming out sometime...
 
seek said:
The problem with phpBB is that...

1) It gets spammed to death by bots.

2) You need to hack the hell out of it to get it to do what you want (which can cause problems with upgrading to the latest versions etc).
Click to expand...

After upgrading to phpBB3 I have had no problems on either point. Its a big step up from phpBB2.
 
seek said:
The problem with phpBB is that...

1) It gets spammed to death by bots.

2) You need to hack the hell out of it to get it to do what you want (which can cause problems with upgrading to the latest versions etc).
Click to expand...

Upgrading is pretty easy (maybe a bit long in some cases) on a modded board as the phpBB team provide instructions on the changes to upgrade your board manually. (e.g. Find: echo "hello"; change to: echo 'hello';).

You do need to hack it quite a bit to get the exact features you want (unless you're alright with default features), but personally for me that's not a problem.

Not sure about the bot bit these days, I would have thought they'd put it anti-bot security by now :confused:

Craig.
 
Zaphan58 said:
After upgrading to phpBB3 I have had no problems on either point. Its a big step up from phpBB2.
Click to expand...
I've used phpBB3 myself and in my opinion it's still lacking. They have taken years to produce a piece of software (is it even finished yet?) which is still way behind the competition.

Sure, it's a huge improvement on phpBB2, but it's simply too little too late.

Craig321 said:
Not sure about the bot bit these days, I would have thought they'd put it anti-bot security by now :confused:
Click to expand...
Well 2.x is just as bad as it ever was. Which is one of the reasons I switched to SMF. They have attempted to improve things with 3.x, but only time will tell if it's effective or not (at this stage it's too early to say).


Also, SMF have announced the forthcoming release of SMF 2.0, which (when released this October) will leave phpBB3 trailing in the dust.
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=163438.0
 
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I think it depends on how in depth you want to go with the forums. If you want something which is quick and easy to get up and running then either PhpBB or Snitz are quite good.
 
I have tried a lot of different forums software's. And I fell happy with phpBB3, It's nice and clean admin panel, and also the way threads and forum posts are shown. You can have a look at my forum http://www.oo360oo.co.uk/forums.
I agree that in phpBB2 the spam bots were ridiculous, but phpBB3 seems to coming along nice and it is not even finally released yet. I am running phpBB3 RC1 :).
 
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