Best discussion forum software

Silver_3

Hi everyone,

What are your opinions on the best discussion forum software? I’ve looked at Invision Board but without the technical knowledge I’m not sure whether it’s the best.

1. Preferably I can use the forum free for a few months, with the option of buying the software to be able to transfer the forum to a dedicated server without any legal/copyright problems.

2. Preferably use the license on multiple websites.

3. Have a good range of features, birthday reminders, forgotten password reminders etc.

Thank you in advance,
Silver

building

uses on this website. maybe ask him? do a search in threads. i know that i posted a similar question a few months back so must be something on this front on this site. good luck.

Silver wrote:

Hi everyone,

What are your opinions on the best discussion forum software? I’ve looked at Invision Board but without the technical knowledge I’m not sure whether it’s the best.

1. Preferably I can use the forum free for a few months, with the option of buying the software to be able to transfer the forum to a dedicated server without any legal/copyright problems.

2. Preferably use the license on multiple websites.

3. Have a good range of features, birthday reminders, forgotten password reminders etc.

Thank you in advance,
Silver

steve_r123

This forum is a vBulletin one and you can get a fre trial demo for evaluation purposes from here... http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo.php

Darksun

phpBB, which is not only one of the best pieces of forum software out there, it's also free and open source, has a great support network and plenty of plugins and expansions to add pretty much any functionality you need.

Silver_3

This forum has many features but I find the look a bit "busy" and hard to read. Just my own personal opinion.

The phpBB forum software looks good. My brother is a software engineer (databases) so hopefully he can help me out a bit although he is very busy.

Thank you for all the replies

Silver

tigermatt

I use PunBB - it is ideal for smaller community forums, but it doesn't have advanced features such as Private Messaging etc. I posted a post a while ago about it, which you may find interesting: [thread]113018[/thread]

There are usually lots of updates being released, at best of all, it is free! You can also download "Mods" which modify the files to add additional features, although these can be a problem when you update, so I only recommend it if you have a backup copy of the files and your database, and you have already got the forum running and got to grips with it.

Website is http://www.punbb.org/

tigermatt