I wanted to get folks opinions on BBS software. I want to set up a BBS for my college fraternity, for alumni and current brothers' use. While I'm familiar with _using_ BBS (mostly this one), I don't know beans about setup and administration of one. What do people think might be good options and what are the pros/cons of differenet packages?

The site I'm thinking of adding to (bonesgate.org) is hosted at namesecure.com who seem to offer MySQL and PHP support - which would seem to be enough for either phpBB or UBBthreads.

Thoughts? Warnings? Am I nuts to try this w/o any prior experience? Let me know. Thanks guys!

-Zeke

I've lost all confidence in phpBB lately, and I've switched to SMF. Of the free forum software packages out there, SMF wins out.

When (and if) they fix phpBB (maybe in the new 3.x release) I'll check it out again, but until then, I'm sticking with SMF.

I'm currently using both version 1.3 and 2.x of Invision Power Board. I've run free versions and have also registered a perpetual licence for the 2.x stream. I don't know how their various licensing schemes are set up right now nor if there's a valid way to run 2.x for free.

http://www.invisionboard.com

The one general dislike I have of UBBThreads is the lack of upgradability. They have added some nice web based upgrade steps now for the database, but the process still tramples on so much custom things. For this board, I modify several templates (fully encouraged) to make it feel more like the boards here have been for a long time. And every upgrade, I have to reapply those changes. If I clone the templates into their own "empeg" name, then I risk the new version simply ignoring the templates if some code changed there. It's why the boards still haven't gone to 6.5.4 like I'd prefer them to be at.

Make sure whatever board software you choose is something that you find you don't want to change much in at all. And unfortunately that is no guarantee things won't stay that way later. This board changed drastically in the 6.x version to try and add a ton of crap most boards have either turned off or ignored. I'm going to evaluate the new version of 7 here soon, and also open a beta clone site of the empeg board to decide if it is going to be worth the effort upgrading versions again. Of course if I don't, the site runs the risk of having some undocumented security hole exploited again.

Thats the last part, always be paranoid of security. Keep offsite backups of the board just in case something happens to the box it is on, either malicious or just simple hardware failure.

We run a very busy board:

"Our users have posted a total of 187656 articles
We have 1458 registered users" This is since October 2004.

We have a few hacks for attaching pics and other bits and pieces, no real issues to be honest, from a users point of view the only other BB system I actually like is this one.

Ricin,
What specifically is the issue with PHPbb, or is it just unreliable/buggy?

Tahir - I assume you're discussing downsizer.net forum? You don't seem to share Ricin's view.

Drakino- I see your point, it seems like there's interruptions during updates. Do you think UBBthreads is any better or worse than other products?

In general - what things should I look for in making a valid comparison between systems? I assume that once I make the plunge with one that changing applicaitons is almost impossible (or at least rather unpaletable)?

-Zeke

There are converters from one format to another for some of the systems, but there are no guarantees that moving from one specific system to any other is possible/easy.

You might also want to explore the situation for integration of your forum software of choice with other software such as portals, content management systems, etc. Anything you think you may require in the future. Of course you can always contract for the development of a custom solution if nothing exists now, but it's always nice to know your options.

Bruno

Well, after much hand wringing and hosting comparisons, I ended up doing as Tahir suggested and setting something up on myfreeforum.org here. Not much to look at now, but it'll let us try things out and if we need a full time host we can move later on. However, the price is right, and the ads aren't obnoxious.

So, thanks for all you help! Hopefully it'll work well, we should be letting others users in soon.

Best,
-Chris

I've managed to kill off the bots that were creating accounts daily on my phpbb site (http://www.roadster-register.com) by blocking the IP address ranges they were using (mostly China-based)

Good to know there's transition options. We're going to try this for a while and see how it goes. I didn't want to commit to a hosting contract if the forum doesn't get used. If things go well, I'll look at options again in six or eight months. It's only for local (non-national) fraternity, so there's only perhaps a few thousand potential bbs members in the world, so I don't expect membership to ever really get above a few hundred.

I've had the forum running (with no real use) for about two weeks and haven't had any bot issues yet. Here's hoping. Thanks again for all the help guys.

-Zeke

I still have to look into the backup options/procedures. I've been so focused on the setup/permissions/groups that I just haven't gotten to that part yet. I imagine it's straight forward, since everything else there has been. The support bbs there looks pretty comprehensive - lots of detail.

A no-ad option would probably be interesting to us, since doing that in-place would be preferable to moving the site once users are used to finding it at its current address.

-Zeke