Forum Software Reviews

Operating System is the core piece where your forum can be installed. Generally, a dependency to a specifical OS came from the web server the forum software support. For example, Microsoft IIS can only be installed on a Windows OS, while Apache can be installed on nearly all operating systems.

The web server totally depends from the technologies used by your forum software. For example, ASP runs under Microsoft IIS, PHP and Python script languages can be installed on every web server (but are generally used with an Apache server).

The development language correspond to the technology that the forum software use. We can separate the existing technologies in two side. The first one is composed of compiled languages, like Java, CGI Bin ( which includes C and every language you want), and .NET.

The database program will store the data of your forum. These datas need to be fully accessible as fast as possible if you want your web site be displayed very quickly.

Generally, forum softwares are, in the point of view of a Database systems, very small applications which do not require important disk space and a highly optimized schemas.

List browsers that are known to be compatible with this forum software.

User agent needs to support the following technologies.

Here are examples of existing posts forms.

Everybody knows these little cute images that we can found in every instant messaging program and in some web sites. This option is generally provided with forum softwares, but can be volontary forgotten if the software wants to be fast and easily readable.

This feature is generally useful for technical forums that generally need files attachments with posted messages. It avoids users to first upload to their own FTP server and then link these files to their message.

Here are examples of possible posts formats.

Private messages are a interested features if you want that users of your forum discuss privately without sharing their email addresses (to avoid Spam bots). The private messages management generally looks like a webmail, and new private messages notifications (this time to the user email) can be activated, to be sure the user will receive and read its messages.

Instant Messaging feature is not really widespread but can be interested if you want to let forum users to directly chat without posting to the forum.

Some moderators generally disagree conversations that users can have on a specifical thread, mainly if the talks has no direct link with the original subject. The instant messaging feature can be a good solution to this problem, because users will prefer use it rather than the asynchronous talks in specifical threads.

Here is a list of existing remote access.

This feature allows any forum user to create a poll, enclosed with the new thread he wants to create. Other users can vote on this poll, and then argue about results.