Need help building a quick and easy forum plz help

[Higgeo]

SMF sucks in my humble opinion. phpbb3 is years ahead against SMF.

 

 

I just like the simplicity of SMF. Perfect for beginner who have no idea.

 

Its not advanced enough for dare's programing sikilz

[daredevil]

I just like the simplicity of SMF. Perfect for beginner who have no idea.

 

Its not advanced enough for dare's programing sikilz

 

It's tooo buggy!

[Krauersaut]

SMF is a nice piece of software, though you can't really compare those. IPB, vB, phpBB exist since nearly 10 years, SMF only about 5 years if I remember correctly.

 

In my eyes, vBulletin was pretty much a classic forum software, established over years, slightly improved over time. The last version became a second IPB. IP.Board was a great forum in version 2, got really overblown in version 3 (Compare Splatterladder with this forum). phpBB is highly customizable, easy to handle and great for beginners, but that's pretty much it. To set up a forum with similar features as the big boys, you have to invest a lot of time with coding, modding and customizing. SMF is some kind of outsider, it's been around for quite a while but isn't really as established as the mayor three. I can't say much about it, I've only taken a quick look at it a while ago.

 

If you're new to that, I would recommend having a closer look at either phpBB or SMF, both look like a pretty good thing to start with. If you're an experienced administrator or feel like needlessly blowing out some unused resources on your servers, you should have a look at IPB or vB. Both are overblown, eat a hell of resources, contain a lot of unnecessary (as well as great) features and will help you grow a large community.

 

A free webhost might be good for some temporary projects, but you should really invest a few dollars into a small webhosting package if you plan to host the forums longer than a few weeks. I would really advise against hosted solutions since you're totally lost as soon as it comes to backing up your database, installing some modifications or pretty much administrating your forums.

 

If you don't feel comfortable with the above four, have a look at ForumMatrix to get some alternatives.