Forum recommendation

[EdenWeb]

Whats a good all round Forum engine? I have phpBB, XMB Forum and simple Machines with my host but I am open to paying for a different solution.

I'd like something that is SEO friendly (or I can apply a 3rd party SEO firendly URL-iser to), has strong admin and scaling capabilities.

If you've any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Interested in pros and cons of custom skinning too.
Thanks
Peter

 

[mneylon]

Vbulletin is my poison of choice.

It's updated regularly and has a fantastic userbase that contribute extensions and modifications.

You can use vBulletin SEO by vBSEO to make it even more SEO friendly than the "out of the box" config (it's what I'm using here)

 

[TheMenace]

Can anyone recommend a free PHP-based forum that SEO-friendly?

 

[Redfly]

Can anyone recommend a free PHP-based forum that SEO-friendly?

Vanilla is great and is SE friendly with contributions. It also has the added benefit of being more user friendly to a less technical audience.

Get Vanilla!

 

[mneylon]

It's nice, but I wonder how well it would scale ...

 

[TheMenace]

Vanilla is nice but it's a bit too far off the beaten track for my liking. And it's not as featured as the general public are used to. I'm playing with PHPbb but it's not great compared to vBulletin. I can't really justify the cost of a vBulletin licence at the moment though.

 

[Redfly]

It's nice, but I wonder how well it would scale ...

Actually, I brought this up on the support forums a while back when I was in talks to buy a rather large PHPbb fourm a while back. The sale never went through, but I was told that it scales quite well and was given a list of very large Vanilla based forums. I don't have the list.but you can find a list of the biggest boards over in their community.

Ken, you are right, it is not as feature rich as VB but most features can be added with the addons.

 

[mneylon]

Ken, you are right, it is not as feature rich as VB but most features can be added with the addons.

Which could get very messy if the extension authors don't keep up to date with the main script....

 

[paul]

my vote would be for Vbulletin for the great admin backend. I'm using Vanilla & phpBB for some sites, but the scope for tweaking them is a lot less, or at least it seems to be more hassle. VB has the nice plugin system. I've never used Invision Power Board.

 

[Cormac]

bbPress support forums is a very tidy looking forum. It is focused on SEO/load/accessibility/cuting out the BS and it's developed by Automattic (Wordpress)

 

[daviddoran]

I'm not too fond of PHPBB or vBulletin but I do really like Simple Machines and Invision Board which are both very professional.