Forum Software Reviews

I have been a regular user of Beehive Forums for quite some time and would like to point out several glaring errors in your review.

Firstly, Beehive definately does support themes, These can be changed right down to a per-user basis and are set using CSS stylesheets and images. There is also a "theme generator" built in to help admins create new themes.

Beehive certainly does provide support for RSS feeds.

Support for Text Captcha is build into Beehive.

File attachments has been built into Beehive for an awful long time and the attachment functionality does support the creation of thumbnail images for image attachments. To claim that such features as this don't exist indicate a glaring lack of integrity in your review as you somehow managed to click "Post" and ignore the very clear "Attachments" button on the post window.

The forum software is fully localisable using a variety of language files, plenty of which have been provided by users of Beehive and which can be selected on a per-user basis.

Regarding frames, I think it's wrong to criticise Beehive for this based on your own personal feelings. A wide range of people find a frame based layout with both threads, folders and thread content accessible at all times to be a very beneficial feature of the user interface.

Beehive was indeed built to imitate the popular layout of Delphi Forums rather than the "flat" layout of forum software such as phpBB. I've personally used several forums based on vBulletin and phpBB and I dislike the sheer amount of backwards and forwards clicking that is required to get from the folder view, to the list of threads, to the actual thread content. They are a nightmare to navigate around unlike frame based forum software. Beehive allows all of these to be viewed at the same time and so this interface provides numerous benefits to those who use it.

Ultimately, I find your review incomplete, clearly incorrect and far too biased by personal feelings rather than an objective pointing out of the actual benefits and drawbacks in terms of real world usage.

Incidentally, I'm not a developer of Beehive or anything like that, just a user of it.

Beehive does support themes, using CSS stylesheets and custom image sets. Also, users can individually choose from several different smiley styles.

Beehive does provide RSS syndication.

The Post form does (optionally) provide a WYSIWYG editor, using TinyMCE.

I believe User management is possible at the individual user level.

The registration page does have "captcha protection".

File attachments with posts have been possible since v0.2

The forum software is fully localizable using language files.

And yes, it uses frames, but it uses them well; they're kind of the whole point, in fact.