Forum creation for an utter noob - looking at options

[TheBigCheese]

Hi guys

I've been asked to put together a community website with I would guess may have around 1000 users signing up but far less...perhaps 100 as regular users.

I have been looking at all the past topics on here regarding forums and I'm not sure what to go with, this is what I've read so far...

vbulletin, sounds ace by all accounts. It's certainly not free, having gone from £60 per year, to £173 for (as far as I understand) the development cycle of version 4...however long that is.


Features I would imagine are needed:

• A system to keep spammers out - captcha? Is it free?
• An effective banning system for griefers
• Ease of use, the users and the creator (me) are novices in this area, so it has to be easy to use, front and back end.
• It has to be search engine friendly, I would imagine that's how the site would generate a significant proportion of new visitors so that's a must.

Is vbulletin worth the rather expensive price now or do the free versions do a good job by themselves?

phpbb seems to get good comments from what I have read here, does it have the features that I have outlined above?

One thing that has got me thinking with vbulletin is that version 4 comes with a "publishing suite" for £173 which 'looks' like it's an easy way to create a website (which is what we would like!) which links into the forum as well.

The users wouldn't need anything that is fancy or flash based, I think the website readers would like as simple (and bandwidth friendly) as possible.

I would be very grateful if someone with any experience could comment on what I have written.

Thanks!

 

[TheBigCheese]

Thank you for the reply.

I have done some more digging on the different forum software and it seems like vbulletin has gone completely down the pan since version 4 came out...big price increases, and a huge amount of bugs etc., it's not something I think I should look at.

Thanks for your suggestion, I've been looking at phpbb with my partner today and it does seem to do everything we want it to do! I think the rest of the afternoon would be time well spent looking at the SEO component you mentioned.

We are looking at using Wordpress as the main site, it seems to be able to create a basic site with easy navigation and hopefully it's easy to update and put subpages etc. into it.

It's all quite exciting at the moment, learning lots of new things!