Forum Software Reviews

vBulletin only won the last three years with that much majority because IPB wasn't even on the list.

I too shall express my love for ProBoards. *nod*

You should add vforums to the list.

They are up and coming free message board service.

ProBoards FTW!

ProBoards is cheating:

http://support.proboards.com/index.cgi?board=pbgt&action=display&thread=...

I know it isn't really cheating, but I don't like how PB has over 100 votes, because of the owner telling people to vote for it, whereas the proper good ones that should be winning aren't, and have hardly any votes.

It would make sense to split them into two categories - free and paid. Then it would work.

So how long does this last?
30 days, 6 months, 12 months, until the server freezes over?

LOL at Xenforo - it hasn't got any features whatsoever!

I think it's funny that fanboys of ProBoards, XenForo and MyBB have voted quickly while true reliable community software such as IPB has barely gotten any votes. This will change over time of course. It won last years vote after all.

lol , XenForo is at RC1 already .. it's been available since oct 6

Vanilla has redefined Forums. Its simplistic design, and focus on usability, has made it the choice for hundreds and thousands discussion boards. Way to go Vanilla.

wtf? This turning into Spams-R-Us or something? Stop spamming your sites geez.

MyBB has been absolutely perfect for my needs and its FREE!! I love it!

ProBoards has my support!

forum community here also.

I prefer yahoo groups, informe and nabble

That was PHPBB, oops my spelling is off

We've used ProBoards now for 11 years and can't praise it enough. The free hosted forum is very easy to customize and operate. I've sampled many other free formats but none can compare with the features ProBoards provides.

Where is Invisionfree? (IPB is not the same.)

My first choice of forum service is by far Jcink- a strangely lesser-known mod of Invisionfree. No other hosted service even begins to compare to the level of power and customization available.

Many of the most popular IF mods are included as standard options very easily turned on/off and edited as options in the Admin CP menu, and countless other mods can be added extremely easily to any or all skins via a system similar to- but much easier to understand than- php. This means that editing codes doesn't require digging through long wrappers, and you can have both a plethora of fully customizable skins (something that takes far more and more complex coding taking up Proboards's singular global wrapper than most have the knowledge much less time or patience to deal with) and don't need to update every skin's coding every time you want to change something (such as in normal IF when using a skin-changer), as well as having the option to have things look and/or work differently on different skins. In addition, Jcink offers more storage space for free than you can buy on some other hosted services. And all this barely scratches the surface.

Aside from the incredible board, the support staff is amazing. The host's admin, also called Jcink, is an idol among webmasters. Not only is he working hard and often to continuously improve things all the time, but he is extremely active on the support boards both in responding to support and feedback threads as well as occasionally participating in general chat. In my experiences, both direct and lurking others' threads, his professionalism has been unmatched, answering questions fully and thoroughly without coming off the slightest bit condescending. (You know that vibe some answers give of "I'm giving so much detail because I don't think you're smart enough to know any of this already"? That doesn't happen.) If a member comes up with a useful idea and shares- such as when I figured out a crude but effective way to re-order skins in the selector without need for a code- he will personally thank the contribution, even. I know I sound like a squealing fangirl, but he is simply the most outstanding combination of hard-working, professional, and down-to-earth that I have seen in any webmaster ever.

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My second choice is plain Invisionfree, which is by far more customizable than ProBoards regardless what so many of these commenters seem to believe. As neither of my first two choices were available, my actual vote went to Zeta simply due to its relation to Invisionfree.

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If I can say something else, though, I wish a board could be down-voted in this poll. Yes, I see the over-a-thousand votes and the horde of positive comments about it. They don't really effect my opinion in the slightest.

I hate Proboards.

Why yes, it is "easy to use"... for people who don't know what they're doing and want a service that will make things as absolutely basic as possible even at the cost of power. If you're looking for a board that you can really customize, however, Proboards actually makes things extremely difficult in my opinion. The way things are set up is so awkward and backwards. Why does it take so much navigating just to edit a board or category? How is a nice big list containing all your options for ALL boards not more simple? I simply can't understand the praise the functionality gets, even while reminding myself most (not all; don't jump down my throat) who run a Proboard know little to nothing about HTML/CSS/scripts.

Contrary to what some have said, too, I have had ample trouble with Proboards every time I have used one as an admin or a member. (I've only been an admin when promoted or on one code-testing board, never started a real board on one.) The majority of them load significantly slower than other forums, to start; in fact, I don't know if the service itself was improved fairly recently or if it's just luck, but the one I am reluctantly currently active on is the only one which I have not experienced major lag on as a constant. (I'm not so petty as to turn down a great site over its being built on a poor host... though it does have to be a great site for me to consider Proboards.) Altered content, such as adding a new code or especially tweaking skin colors, always takes an additional refresh or two to become fully active after the intitial submission.

And most annoying of all, I have had multiple experiences on multiple sites with Proboards deciding something has or has not been typed in contradiction to what many checks and rechecks and resubmissions of post content say. In one instance, a friend had typed a post which had several images, each followed by a block of text. Everything between the first image and fourth block of text refused to appear in the post when submitted despite still being there when editing. In another, Proboards was so convinced I had the end of a list typed that it put it in the post twice; when the list was removed entirely it was still shown once. I tried making a new topic with the same content to avoid the glitch in the original and the glitch somehow followed. At least three other cases come to mind off the top of my head. In all cases like this, the only solution I know of is to completely change the entire post (I usually just change it all to "...") and resubmit, then go back in and change it back in two or more segments (depending on how much is glitched), resubmitting between each. In one case, this only fixed it for about an hour before it glitched again in the same way. I've never experienced anything vaguely similar even once in seven years of using various other services, including Invisionfree almost constantly for over six. I've used Proboards only about a cumulative year-and-a-half, give or take, across this time and had so many problems.

Oh. Also, Invisionfree has over twice as many archived codes, at least by iFcode's count, and many that are listed as "Proboards" codes also work on IF with little to no change (such as changing "titlebg" to "titlemedium" in the class), where I've been less successful trying it the other way. So there goes that potential argument for it.

Invisionfree > Proboards. Period. And Jcink is Invisionfree with superpowers. So again, why is at least IF not listed here?

ATTENTION ALL SPAMMERS!

GO *insert extremely painful and eventually deadly action here* YOURSELVES!

If you want to spam, go spam each other behind closed doors. Just get lost and stop annoying people, we're not gonna make it worth your time and effort!

I voted for Vanilla because I have so far been very unhappy with every other forum except Vanilla 2.0. I wanted forum software that could integrate well with Joomla as easily as possible whilst still having all the features of other top forum software.

Vanilla 2.0 has an embed function and to make the best use of that with Joomla, you might see from my own website www.thisisxbox.com All I had to do was use an Import tool found on the Vanillaforums website to obtain the data from my old phpbb forum, then install with ease on the servers a fresh Vanilla install, and then finally import into it the data obtained from my old forums. It maintained all the old discussions, all the users etc - and now for the best part!

To put that fully functioning fantastic forum on my website for my users to use, I only needed to create a new Article page and drop in just one line of code which is given to you in the forum dashboard. Use Joomla's Menu Manager to link a new menu item to the Article page and now I have an embedded forum that sits well with my site design - and no other forum could look better, or perform better ! (in my opinion)

ProBoards all the way! ProBoards is SO the best. IT has all the features and is simple for everyone to use. You can customize it any way you want. You can even block cuss words! Even the coding is simple. And the staff? Mr. Patrick Clinger is the nicest and most helpful person I've met online. As for MyBB,well, I don't use this word often, it SUCKS. TRuly SUCKS.

I'd like to start out by saying that pro-boards does deserve a 1# rating. I was at first a regular on a pro-board back in 2005. When I started my own forum in 2006 I chose pro-boards, because it was by far the best forum available at the time. Proboards compensates for my weaknesses. It is easy to organize, and largely maintains itself. It is secure and I love the PM service.

I don't know code, or rather do not have a head for remembering code. Yet I managed to use enough code to create a very pretty site in less than 48 hours, back in 2006... the first skin I made was a bit tacky but I had my members create skins, and those looked even better. I didn't stick to basics and I had never seen the type of code used on pro-boards before. There are some beautiful sites on Proboards and I just took a little tour of them for ideas. I learned the code, long enough to create the forum. I had the thing up in a couple of days, and we've enjoyed it ever since.

I am sure there are great new service providers, but for ease of use, flexibility of design options, and the ability to lock threads and control and minimize human error in our staff... well it is great. I've set up a lot of other websites since, and other than putting up a blogger page, Pro-boards is the easiest service provider I've ever encountered. Proboards is the host of what I consider to be the family room of all my sites. It's a comfortable environment to talk with friends. I love my site!! spiritsense.proboards.com

nabble is a good forum

Nabble is the best Forum.

Nabble es el Mejor Foro.

Proboards is what I have been familiar with my entire life in the world of forums. I first learned about it about 6 years ago, when I first started playing RPGs. Now I've used it to create my own RPGs, and other forums for various purposes. I've always loved Proboards because of its ease of use, tons of cool and customizable features, and it cleanliness and professionality. I recommend it to anyone that knows anything about forums. GO PROBOARDS!

I really surprice when know about this web and forum...
Amasing...excellent

I have just created a forum GREENTECH and you can be a member with a green cause on http://greentech.1058436.n5.nabble.com.I find Nabble very user friendly and very easy to manage.wish all success to Nabble.See it for yourself and have an experience with Nabble...

best regards
VIRAF S MEHTA

I like Burning Board Lite

We are running Xenforo and very happy with it. You can check out it's features on our live forum: Dogs India

We chose Xenforo over vbulletin and IPB because of it's dynamic nature. It is more engaging for our users as well.

I have been using Proboards for many, many years and I can by far state that it is my favorite service. I've tried using services such as forumotion before, but the thing that puts Proboards above the others is the simplicity of its admin controls and how easy it is to mod the board to your design taste with coding. It's insanely easy to get support for the board also. Numerous times I have posted on PB's dedicated support board forum with my questions and problems (Usually a coding mistake), and my question has always been answered within a day by one of the owners of PB, always with courtesy and professionalism, and always with a smile. They never got annoyed with me, and were always willing to work with me as long as it took to get the issue resolved. Bravo Proboards, and may you remain for many years to come.

LOL phpBB cheaters, no votes for whole day and now 1 vote per second? U must be kidding me.

Lol, this makes no sense at all! All votes for phpBB and Yazd are made by proxies. Please check their IPs for more information.

I don't even understand it why these people try hard to get #1 for forum software, when they clearly aren't. The only thing they prove with this is because they are really SHITTY software with kids developers )

This is a load of you know what.

Sorry guys, but the voting is totally unreliable this year. You need to better protect your poll system, while the ones breaking it need a life

Mybb is best

MyBB is the best and a wide platform. Very flexible and easy to use. I have planned my wedding dress with the help of communities in MyBB platform.

Hi all,

Sorry for last year's problem with this load of fake votes and spams. As usual, it's when you're offline that the shit happens. I'm gonna revert results of phpBB, YAZD and MesDiscussions to their initial results before this happened, and gonna track the IPs address (if it's not a pack of zombie pcs) to prevent this from happening again (even if I have some doubts about this).

Official Results of 2011 should be announced soon! Sorry again for these ******* spammers.

Nice to see the fake votes removed and to see the current results again, thanks for fixing it lastnico.