Which open source forum system do you reccomend?

[Poritz]

I will be launching a site in the future and the forums are the essence of the idea. I have been looking for while now around the internet for bulletin board systems. I wanted to use an open source system for two reasons: first, I believe in the open source movement and I want to support it, and also because it will help keep expenses down. I will go with a commercial system if I get a good enough argument. In the most ideal situation the site would have 10,000 actives a year from now if I launched today. Because it has the potential for a large amount of traffic, I need to know what I pick today will work well in the future because the idea of switching systems doesn't appeal to me at all. I am appealing to the AnandTech community for advice. What systems, have you worked with and like, and especially those that you did not like.

Here is what I have been seriously considering so far:
YaBB
YabbSE
phpBB

-Poritz

 

phpBB is really nice and easy to set up.

 

[eklass]

you could do something like postnuke and PNphpBB2

PostNuke
PNphpBB2

 

[Poritz]

Well I looked at postnuke and was unimpressed. It seems to promise a lot and I am fairly sure that it would deliver, but it just looks too new and the team working on it seems not to care much about first impressions from the website. The site failed to really tell me what it was, how it worked and so forth, though I deduced the some general ideas.

I also feel that using some thing like that might box me in a little too much for future expansion. I need some thing that would be simply a good bulletin board. I feel that when something that tries to be too many different things sometimes doesn't perform as well. I will reconsider that once the project has gone gold.

I found another forum "Snitz" What do people know about it?

Thanks for the suggestions eklass. What other things do people around here know about?

-Poritz

 

[xirtam]

I used an ASP forum awhile ago that worked extremely well. But it's obviously only functional on a Windows-based server, which you might (hopefully) not be using. If you're interested, I'll look it up, but otherwise I'll cast my support for phpBB.

 

[Poritz]

Eureka! I believe I have found the solution for my needs. It seems to have every that I would need and then some, a very wide, strong, and active user base, and it is definately gold! Behold:

PHPnuke

Now that I feel like a genius for finding it, I realize too that probably everyone already knew about it. So tell me what you have heard, what you think from the user end, administrator end, and so forth and so on.

Thank you for your help eklass, your suggestion introduced me to this kind of system and helped me find it.

So Excited! My site may be a reality after all!

-Poritz

 

[Gooberlx2]

Originally posted by: dwell
phpBB is really nice and easy to set up.

Is it just me or does anyone else think that the search function in phpBB is crap? IIRC it searches in both subject and body, and doesn't seem to sort results very well. I like ones that only search subject (or have an option for it). Atleast that's how it was last time I visited the Gentoo forums which is phpBB 2.0.4.

But I'll admit, it's very easy to setup and admin.