Weycrest Knowledgebase

Both phpBB and vBulleting are extremely powerful and sophisticated bulletin board software.

Each software comes with advocates and its detractors, but it tends to boil down to users personal preferences. However phpBB is free and opensource, and is favoured by the smaller forums. vbulleting is a product of Jelsoft and requires a licence but is very popular with large forum operators who require paid support.

Importantly phpBB and Vbulletin are what are known a s “Search Engine Friendly” as well as user friendly. What this tends to mean is that the dynamically generated URL’s encourage spider activity. Also both phpBB and vBulletin make use of MySQL for the backend database engine, and PHP as the scripting engine.

vBulletin also has a very active Community which can help you with your support queries. phpBB also has an active community forum where the developers community are active and fix bugs in their software.

The only problem with phpBB is that it has suffered a few security issue’s in the past, and this has made a target for hackers, who have used vulnerabilities to compromise the host’s servers. However the security problems were rapidly put right by the phpBB development team.

However if you choose any kind of forum software, you will need to keep your forum up to date and subscribe to any security bulletins. You will also have to familiar with the procedures required to update your forum software. Always backup your forum fully before carrying out a major update (especially the MySQL database).

You can see all the features of both bulletin board software packages on their websites:

http://www.phpBB.com
http://www.vbulletin.com/

Other forum software that is gaining considerable transaction is SMF from Simple Machines:

http://www.simplemachines.org/