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Comment by BizarreByte | Hacker News Reader

I used to despise PhpBB, at the time I thought it was vastly inferior to SMF. SMF seemed far more professional, the closest you could get to vbulletin while being free.

In retrospect I miss it just as much. I really do mourn the loss of communities I was part of, I even owned one for a short while.

The friends, the discussions, the projects, all lost to time.

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I wasn't a fan of PhpBB either but got used to it as a user.

PunBB, Flux, and MyBB were fantastic for small admin teams. There was very little overhead for modification and maintenance. I ran a PunBB board for over a decade. It was extremely lightweight, and if you left off the footer ID & version info in the template you wouldn't get hacked nearly as easily as with the popular systems.

(One of the worst ever was when I used a Joomla-integrated forum though...that install seemed to be sniffed at by bots endlessly)

(There was also a German commerical PHP board that I was paid to maintain for my city, can't remember the name but it worked really well. It's probably still around)

WoltLab Burning Board was the one big German counterpart to PhpBB, quite popular in Germany at the time.

I also ran a PunBB forum (an automotive forum) for about 6 years before selling the site to VerticalScope. It was the largest PunBB-powered site for quite some time, by number of posts and users, and considering that it's still running the same old version of PunBB to this day, I'm guessing that the VerticalScope team couldn't figure out how to migrate it to InvisionPowerBoard.

Shocked they haven't been hacked and defaced, but PunBB never seemed to attract much attention compared to PhpBB and others.

I'm not familiar with SMF but screenshots give me InvisionFree vibes. All my favourite forums were all on InvisionFree. Is this the same thing?

SMF means Simple Machines Forum, which is a FOSS project. InvisionFree was a for-profit company. I don't know if InvisionFree ran on SMF.

I wonder if vbulletin is still a superior product, or if the free products have caught up over the years, as forums lost popularity.

vBulletin appears to still be in active development so I would imagine it's still ahead of the crowd, whether phpBB has caught up to where vBulletin was a decade ago is the question.

vBulletin got bought by Internet Brands in 2007. While vBulletin 4 was pretty good (after a lot of upgrades), vBulletin 5 is a buggy and somewhat disastrously unpopular piece of software, with most of its users having gone to either XenForo (by the original dev team), Invision Power Board, or the various free products like phpBB, SMF, MyBB, Discourse, etc.

So if you're after the 'best' forum solution now, your best bet is definitely not vBulletin anymore.

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