Forum Software Comparison Guide

As of late, the SH/SC Thread of the Week has been “HEY GUYS WHAT FORUM SHOULD I USE?!”. In the past, the answer has begrudgingly been “Just use phpBB, because it’s free and not too broken”, but phpBB has taken a significant nosedive in quality, and several quite suitable replacements have cropped up in its place. Apart from the freebies there’s also the industry standards that have never gone away. In this article I’ll be outlining the systems worth talking about, some essential mods for them, and weighing all their assorted pros and cons.

What You Need to Know

Forums are pretty complex things, and before diving in there are a few things you need to take into consideration to figure out what system is best for you.

1. Security – This should be your #1 concern. What kind of security track record does a given system have? How frequently are exploits released? How quickly do the developers respond? How easy is the upgrade process?
2. Customizability – Mods and Themes are often important, as it’s rare that you’ll find a forum with everything you could ever want out-of-the-box, so an active modding and theming community plus good documentation for both will be important.
3. Price – Do you really want to pay for the right to use a given forum system on a yearly basis? Is paid support really important to you?
4. Spam Protection – Without some kind of CAPTCHA system, most forum systems are open to Spambots auto-registering accounts and plastering your forums with all manner of spam. Some forums have built-in CAPTCHAs, while others require mods.
5. Experience – How much experience do you have with PHP? How about some form of SQL? It will help immensely to have experience with both, especially if you’re going to be looking to do any level of customization. Some systems like SMF are a bit friendlier to people with less coding experience, but a good background is going to help you across the board.
6. Security – Yes I know it’s here twice, because it needs to be. You need to be reminded that developers fixing code is just half of the security process. You have to know that if you’re going to run a forum, or any kind of publicly accessable software application on the internet, you have to stay up to date on it. Get on their release mailing list, bookmark their Secunia product page, check out milw0rm every once in awhile. BE PARANOID. Just remember that the upgrade you decide to skip or postpone because “Aw man, it’s Friday afternoon, I don’t feel like upgrading my forum installation” will be the one that would have patched an exploit that some script kiddy’s worm will be using that weekend to turn your server into molten slag. I wish I was making this up.