recommendations for bboard/forum?

[KParker]

I volunteer on a small neighborhood web site, and I have been looking at different sites to start a forum page. Basically what I need is a moderated forum that is simple, clean looking, has security features, and is somewhat customizable. I have looked at ezboard (http://www.ezboard.com/index.html), which is a web based forum hosting service and a few others. Does anyone have any advice on forum hosting vs. forum software that is installed on the site? I will be the only mod for now, and I'm pretty sure things will start off slowly. I want to keep it simple, if that's possible. Thanks.

[mairving]

Well the one used here, Vbulletin is not free($160) but it is one of the best. Several other good ones are <a href="http://www.xmbforum.com/" target="_blank">XMB</a> and <a href="http://www.phpbb.com/" target="_blank">PHPBB</a>. I used to like <a href="http://www.woltlab.de/en/news.php" target="_blank">Burning Board</a> quite a lot but their latest release has a call home function which reports back some info to them which has about killed it. All of the above require PHP and MySQL which most hosts should have. All are generally easy to setup and customize some. Detailed customization can be a real pain though.

Hope this helps.

[Christoph]

I run a phpbb board and it is Ok. Problem is just that the developers need forever to bring out updates. For months they talk about version 2.0 but they are so slow. I am seriously thinking about converting to another board.

Christoph

[Xayd]

Ikonboard is still using perl so it's not quite as speedy as anything php, but it is as fully featured as anything else out there and very stable, I like it.

[KParker]

Thanks for the information, all of you. The sites you gave me marving, I like a lot. Both look easy to install, and support looks ok too. I forgot to mention, we are using FrontPage 2000 for the site. I know FP will really screw up code, and was wondering if this would be the same with any forum software installed on the site. That's why I was looking at forum hosting, so I won't have to deal with that right now. I'm stuck with FP for now and I can do HTML, but I don't want any more work than necessary at the moment.

[mairving]

KParker, I don't know the answer to your FP question. It doesn't hurt to try though. I would suspect that any problems encountered would be minor.

[Xayd]

A forum is just a collection of scripts that generate pages based on data pulled from a database. There's very little HTML involved, only slight 'tweaks' you might do for looks here and there.

[KParker]

Thanks everyone, I really appreciate the feedback. I will try one of those BB's and see how it works.