If you want to start a forum, you first have to choose the forum software you will be using.
There are many possibilities:
These are just the ones that most people know or have seen.
Which is best?I cannot say that for you. It depends on your needs and your personal preference.
Each system has its own advantages and disadvantages. So it's up to you to decide.
But I can say which one I like the most...
Why do I use SMF? When I first started my community, I used phpBB. The forum I "replaced" also used it, and some other forums where I was a member of also.
So that was the one I was most familiar with, and probably the biggest free forum system.
Everything went great... I installed some mods, installed a few themes and so on.
But...It was very difficult too keep up with their security updates.
It happened frequently that they found a new security hole or bug, and then you had to update.
That's already one of the major disadvantages of phpBB.
But it was only after my forum got hacked, that I started to look for something else.
One day, somebody got in the admin control panel, and changed the descriptions of all the sub forums and categories.
He (or she...) placed a link to a very large image in those descriptions (or more then 1 image), so the entire layout got messed up.
The database was unchanged, so no real harm was done.
But what would they do next time??
Then I saw a link to SMF somewhere, and decided to give it a try.
I installed it on another host, showed it to all my members and asked about their opinions.
Most of them didn't really care, but I really wanted to use SMF.
So I converted the phpBB tables to SMF and installed SMF and got rid of phpBB
Must admit that I've never regretted that decision :)
I'll give you a brief list of the advantages and disadvantages of SMF (in my opinion...):
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| Very easy to install | Permissions are hard to understand in the beginning |
Awesome support forum!
People are really helpful there | Not as many modifications as there are for phpBB |
| Lots of features | Can't think of more negative things about SMF... |
| Build-in Search Engine Friendly url's (More about SEO later) | |
| And I can think of many, many more =) |
If you want to try SMF out, you can always join
my forum ;)
But like I said before, you have to decide for your own.
But let me give you this advice:
Don't use phpBB just because it's the biggest and most well-know (free) forum on the internet.
There are a lot of systems you can choose from.
Maybe I'll create a longer and more detailed list in the future...
Anyway, hopefully this made you think about all the possibilities...
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