Forum Software Reviews

About UBB.threads

UBB.threads exists since 1997, and thousands of websites have chosen it for their community solution. UBB.threads integrates several additional tools, like a Portal and a Photo Gallery (UBB.Gallery), with a direct advantage: your website can entirely rely on the UBB.threads product.

Prices:

• UBB.threads Standard License $139
  1 year free access to upgrades
• UBB.threads Silver License $499
  5 year free access to upgrades / 3 hours of advanced support included

• UBB.threads Gold License $725
  Lifetime free access to upgrades / 5 hours of advanced support included

Review Updates

• August 22nd, 2010: UBB.threads 7.5.6 released.
• January 1st, 2010: Update the review since UBB.threads has been acquired by Mindraven.

YaBB is one of the oldest existing forum software on Internet. It started in 2000, when PERL was the most powerful tool for designing website. YaBB has clearly defined its path since the past 10 years, and still could be considered as a good alternative if you have skills in installing and configuring the mod_perl Apache module.

YaBB History

After creating YaBB in 2000, it has been forked 2 years later to create YaBB SE, a complete PHP rewrite of the codebase. This fork, that is now discontinued, has been quickly renamed to establish one of the most known free forum software: Simple Machines.

YaBB could also be considered as one pillar of the current forum software world, because E-Blah (no longer maintained) was also forked from the YaBB codebase, and, more over, the well known Matt Mecham, co-creator of Invision Power Services with Charles Warner, was initially a YaBB developer (before creating Ikonboard).

Note that YaBB had recently lost its main sponsor, Xnull Internet Media, Inc., and took advantages of this information to revamp its main website and be hosted to Sourceforge web servers.

YaBB Licensing

YaBB is a free forum software, but you can ask for copyright removal if you wish, for a given amount:

$0 - Free YaBB Public License

You can use YaBB forum if you agree with its YaBB Public License.

$150 Copyright Removal License

This license is required for any website that wishes to remove the copyrght displayed on the bottom of a single YaBB forum..

$50 Executable Renaming License

This license is required if you wish to rename the YaBB.pl main script executable (visible in your forum URL) to another name such as index.pl or by hiding it completely.

Review Updates

• August 19, 2010: First Review.

From E-Blah Website:

E-Blah is open source community building forum software built with security, stability, and speed in mind.

E-Blah is a Perl-based forum system requiring very low system requirements making it a fast and flexible forum system. E-Blah is a forum constantly evolving, with new releases several times throughout the year.

Whether the audience is large, small, or in-between the E-Blah Forum Software is here to help it grow. Also, with our virtually twenty four-seven technical support team, whom are ready to answer any question you may have about the system, you cannot go wrong.

E-Blah History

E-Blah is what we can call an aggressive fork of the famous YaBB forum software. E-Blah main developer was indeed part of the development team of YaBB, but after some disagreements, he finally left the team and created its own product, E-Blah. He apparently tends to continue copying features from YaBB, from time to time.

Review Updates

• August 21st, 2010: I didn't notice that, but apparently, E-Blah is officially no more supported since 2010, so I mark it as unmaintained.

What is Simple Machines?

Simple Machines is one of the oldest existing forum software on Internet. This product has always guarantee an high level of quality compared to some softwares that prefer providing the hugest list of features, not always well integrated. 4 years separate the SMF 1.1 version and the next major one, Simple Machines 2.0, that is not yet released (actual version is Release Candidate 3 - meaning that the release is going to happen soon).

Let's discover this software, step by step, by following this review, separated in 4 parts.

Note on the Simple Machines License: Simple Machines is released under a custom license, named the Simple Machines LLC. Basically, the forum software is free, as a free beer, and the only restriction you have is that you could not modify it without a permission from its authors. It looks like to an open source license, but that would insist on the belonging the source code. You could not for example redistribute the project with your own modifications without inform and without having the agreement of the Simple Machines teams.

FreeForums.org was created in 2007, and the first goal was to develop the most powerful service for forum hosting. To succeed, they have based their own forum service on the famous phpBB software, customized with a dedicated and custom admin interface. This way, FreeForums.org successfully combines the most known and used forum software with a really simple and awesome administration interface, that extends phpBB's one very well and nicely.

As usual, a forum hosting company could be consider as reliable if its support really exists and really solve the problems you encounter. This has been understood by FreeForums, that has a 24/24 support team, in different places, and that is really dynamic and fast.

Administration Panel (Advanced)

Administration Panel (Simple)

The default service is of course free, and additional paying features could be ordered, like DNS hosting, advertisements removal, copyright removal, and so on. For a typical installation, you should count around $7 per month, that is really cheap for the kind of service provided! Remember that, compared to a self-hosted forum, you have with FreeForums.org a really powerful architecture, backups and a technical team if you encounter problem with your installation.

Review Updates

• August 8th, 2010: First Review.

What is Drupal?

Drupal is a free software that allows individual or community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a website. The primary goal of Drupal is to provide a really powerful framework on which you can install additional packages to get the website you dream.

As a CMS, Drupal is not firstly targetted on the management of a forum software, but it however contains, in its default package, a Forum module, that allows you to plug a board to your website, including all features of Drupal (friendly URLs, users management, content publishing,...)

Drupal is a free open source software, and serves many big websites, like the US White House website, official France portal,...

Why reviewing a CMS?

Indeed, it could come out that a CMS is not really suited for supporting a forum software, because its module could not be as powerful as a dedicated software would be. You have to think that a community is not the only thing you want to host on your website. Posting articles, tips, ideas and reviews on a forum is, of course, possible, but maybe there are some other better way to do that. One of the possible solution is a CMS or a blog, which, with articles or blog entries won't prevent you from having comments, and could of course be related to an additional forum topic.

Here are some use cases of a CMS. Look at this list carefully before thinking to a forum-only website:

• Community web portals
• Discussion sites
• Corporate web sites
• Intranet applications
• Personal web sites or blogs
• Aficionado sites
• E-commerce applications
• Resource directories
• Social Networking sites
• Collaborative authoring environments
• Podcasting
• Picture galleries
• File uploads and downloads

If your idea is in this list, then you should take some times to read this review to see if Drupal could match your desires.

Review Updates

• June 16, 2010: Some updates.
• March 25, 2009: Additional Modules have been added to the review to explain how to improve a default Drupal installation.

About NearForums

NearForums is a recent forum project, based on the ASP.NET MVC framework, and has been released for the first time in June 2010. Its main developer, Jorge Bay has chosen the GPL to license his work.

Review Updates

• July 13, 2010: First Review.

Why Tal.ki?

Tal.ki website claims that Tal.ki is the easiest way to embed a forum on a website. After creating an HTML page and add the code snippet given by the wizard, the only thing we can answer is: Yes, this is true!

Installing a forum on a website has never been that much easy! Let's see now what features you can have for this installation in a minute process...

Review Updates

• July 8, 2010: First Review.