Forum Software Reviews

Last October, we introduced you the Forum for pages product, a Facebook plugin integrating a nice forum software into your Facebook page.

This product was particularly useful since Facebook was planning to remove its official Forum application.

Forum for Pages - Main Topics Page

Forum for Pages - Timeline Homepage

Back to present, Forum for pages has continued evolving and got more and more features, including:

It's been a long time without any news here... But don't worry, we are still here, and, to give you some clues about this, let's introduce the new Forum Comparator selector. Much more simpler and lighter than the previous huge & horrible yellow block, this comparator allows you selecting your forums directly through a tooltip. To add a more forums to the comparison, simply click on the + Select of a free column to compare it with current software.

New Forum Comparator Selector Screenshot

During the revamping of this interface, we've also implemented a feature you have waited for a long time: the ability to compare forums only on their differences! Tick the Show Differences Only on a current comparison, and features shared by compared forums are removed, letting you discovering real differences between bulletin boards.

I cannot leave you without the traditional link to the comparator, initializing it to a really popular search: MyBB vs Simple Machines 2 vs XenForo.

As usual, do not hesitate to report your feedback and bugs (bugs?!?, really?) using the Contact page.

Twelvestone has just been reviewed, and this test is available at Twelvestone Review.

Additionally, we have also installed it on our sandbox environment to let you test and discover this software via the Twelvestone Demo.

Beautiful and Simple, Modern and Responsive, Twelvestone is a new hosted forum solution we are eager to review.

Some fun for the beginning of 2012 with the famous Grand List of Forum and Community Laws, that basically sums up how, what and why most Internet Communities are going to react on a given event.

I cannot resist about giving you an excerpt of this long list of 151 bullets (and counting!, web rules regularly evolves :

• "FIRST POST!":
  In any "response to a new installment of something" thread, there is 74.3% chance that the first post will include the poster stating that they got the first post. At least half the time, the post will consist only of the "I got the first post!" comment, and nothing of any use.
  Corollary: On more popular sites, the first five to ten posts will consist of the above, either by posters who aimed for the first post but missed, or continuing the chain by posting "second!" "third!" and so on.
  Corollary 2: The more people who continue identifying their post order, the more likely it will spark an argument with the other users complaining about how much they hate people who do this.
• Page Break Effect:
  Unless the final post of the previous page is quoted, the post will usually be forgotten
• Atheismo's Law:
  If you talk about religion, it will lead to debate.
• Politico's Law:
  Any mention of politics will trigger a debate.
  Corollary: The longer said debate goes on, the less likely it is to ever be resolved or end.
• ...

See the complete list here: The Grand List of Forum and Community Laws and enjoy!

After a huge battle among all competitors all over the 2011 year, we are proud to announce the final results of our yearly competition to promote the Best Forum Software, in the 3 following categories: Free, Commercial and Hosted.

With 146 comments posted and more than 14.500 voters, the competition was this year really intense and popular. So popular that the poll was even attacked by a bot swarm that tried to elect at the last second different forum software.

It's now time to officially announce the results:

Best Free Forum Software: MyBB

MyBB doubled it! After earning the best free forum software category of 2010, it was selected by 2294 readers as the best free forum of 2011. After a lively fight during the year against phpBB and YaBB, MyBB finished the course with a large gap (temporarily reduced due to a bot attack fortunately stopped

MyBB can thank its really enthusiastic and dynamic community, providing more and more help, assistance and content (plugins, themes,...) to the MyBB team. With the next MyBB 2.0 in heavy development, we are confident that we will discuss about MyBB all over 2012 too!

Best Hosted Forum Service: ProBoards

For the first time, and with the brilliant score of 2635 voters (best performance among all categories), ProBoards is the winner of the Best Hosted Forum Software award of 2011.

The least we can say is that ProBoards definitely deserves this award, after a great score on its review and above all because of the huge community around this hosted forum.

ProBoards is a great hosting solution that provides forum pages for free to everyone since 2000, almost 12 years from now!

Best Commercial Forum Software: Burning Board

Burning Board, the renown forum product from Germany, finally reached the first place in the Best Commercial Forum Software category, with the impressive score of 2335 voters. Even if Burning Board is not the most known forum software all over the world, it is definitely a product that is worth it, and that provides a really great list of features and additional products around the Burning Board core.

You can also consult the dedicated Best Forum Software of 2011 page for more details.

... And 2012 has just started!

So, start immediately voting for your favorite software on the new dedicated page for electing the Best Forum Software of 2012!

We are really proud to announce the release of our review of the SocialEngine software. SocialEngine could be considered as the future of all modern PHP platforms, providing a great base, aka SocialEngine core, that could be extended by many additional services and plugins. One of the main goal here is to keep the "social" word as a central concept for every single features developed and available.

As usual, a software license has been gracefully donated to FSR in order to let you do your usual testing on our sandbox environment: SocialEngine Demo.

This is the first time we review an Imageboard software, and we start with the new Nitpick 2011. You probably know the famous 4chan website, that also relies on the same concept: provide an easy way for people to discuss and share pictures with other members. If this is what you are looking for, you are not going to be disappointed with Nitpick 2011, if not, maybe its design could surprise you a bit.

• Read the NitPick 2011 Review.
• NitPick 2011 Demo.
• NitPick 2011 Screenshot Gallery.

As we reported it on a previous news, Facebook is planning to remove the Discussion Boards app from all Facebook pages on October 31th, including all previous discussions, topics and messages. Fortunately, a small Irish company, Pixode Ltd, has released a new application, called Forum for pages for Facebook, providing a basic forum software for this social network AND allowing you to migrate your data from the old Discussion Board app to this one.

If you want to see it right now, our Facebook page was migrated to this new application.

Here is how to backup and keep a forum on your own Facebook page:

Here we are for our monthly press review of October 2011:

• Invision Power Services was really active during September, releasing their eCommerce and business management application IP.Nexus 1.3.2, their search engine optimization tool IP.SEO 1.5.1, and a development version of IP.Board 3.2.3.
• Internet Brands is also celebrating a new release of vBulletin 4.1.7.
• Please remember upgrading your MyBB installation to 1.6.4, which integrates a fix of a security vulnerability. Note that MyBB 1.6.5, that will be the next version with new features, seems getting closer to release. The MyBB Merge System is also upgraded to 1.6.2, fixing 21 bugs mostly for PunBB, IPB, phpBB, SMF and vBulletin importations.
• After celebrating their first anniversary, the XenForo team is working hard on the next major version 1.1, that will provide many features like custom profile fields, Admin Control Panel search feature, auto-embedding media resources, notices, thread prefixing, right-to-left language support and many more!
• Single-Sign-on is finally included into Vanilla. For this feature to be supported on your forum, you will have to select among the two following plugins: ProxyConnect or jsConnect.
• Finally, the two competitors FluxBB and PunBB gained a +1 on their respective version number, mostly for fixing security issues

Happy reading, and enjoy the coming week-end!

Facebook has decided to remove all Discussion Boards from Pages on October 31th, 2011. This is a real sad news for Facebook Pages managers, that are going to lose thousands of topics and messages that were stored in this really popular Facebook Page Application, that reached 54 million users per month during its most active period.

Facebook Discussion Board on Pages