phpBB - The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
 

I am evaluating forum/bulletin board software. I like phpBB and bbpress. I heard of horror stories about vBullentin.

Does anybody have experience with phpBB?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thank You

Simple to use and install, loads of good free themes and designers to do custom. But it's open source so you have to upgrade every time there is an upgrade to be had or you might get hacked. There are loads of stuff you can add to it as well and there are step by step in the forums on how
If you're going to use a forum in a members area, it works great

http://bbpress.org/ is looking better after reading how to hack phpBB.

I installed a forum once with phpBB.
My problem was that bots were constantly spamming the whole forum every day.
Even the captcha protection did not work.

thats the problem with open source, phpbb is very good about keeping on top of getting updates to the software when needed, me, I just love the free part and with the big community, they are always coming up with new add-ons

i like punbb :)

I like the free part and large community but I did see a ton of bot spam from other phpBB sites too.

Same thing, no matter what I did I was getting KILLED by spammer bots

change the name of some files and links and 98% of the spam is gone.

Me too,i tested a lot of boards and this was is definitely best in area of free board scripts.

I installed cat captcha and problem was solved

I have run forums with vBulletin and phpbb. Out of the two I probably had less problems with phpbb.

punbb, smf,.. depends what kind of forum you'll be running...

My forum was initially successful with at least 10 active members, a Tiffany Preston fansign and a $50/month advertising revenue. It all fell apart because of constant bots and spam.

I use phpBB to power http://forum.peedy.net



If you need something simple, punBB is kickass, secure, fast. I used phpBB because its more full featured and has the most community support for a free product.