Why don't you pay the money for a paid forum software for VBulletin, it has been around for so long and it is very established. On top of that, there are so many modules for you to install onto it and the look and feel is really great, by far the most original out of all the forum software I have taken a look at. Its only $70 for a subscription or something like that. A forum I am posting at is also using VBulletin and it is really amazing.

TRY IT!

phpBB2 is the best forum software which is available free of cost and have so many features, but its features are not much better than VB and IPB.

I found VB as the most powerfull software for forum and than IPB..............but i don't have so much money to afford these softwares

Yeah, SMF is good. Closest to IPB you'll get without buying IPB (unless you use versions prior to IPB 2.0 - which are no longer legally downloadable, but are legal to use if you had it before they took them off), and it is just sooooo easy to customise and admininstrate. It also has tons of mods, including some remakes of IPB mods (such as the shop) and many of them are already part of SMF! (Download Manager, Karma Mod)

I loved SMF, and I did use it for two months on one of my sites, but I still vouch for IPB. But then, if someone came up with a mod like the Army System or something for SMF, that would most likely pursuade me to come back to SMF

Actually, they'd need to do one other thing too. Because I easily lose track of what a topic means, I like to use IPB's Linear+ layout so that I can see the first post at all times. SMF has a mod to emulate Linear+, but instead of copying the first post onto new pages, it starts another page when one fills up, then makes a new post with the same content as the first. This annoys me since:

1. it adds to the post count,
2. it reduces the amount of posts that can be shown on a page,
3. The change will always remain even if you disable the mod, unless you delete the posts it makes.

I'd like to see a better mod that doesn't have these quirks.

This post has been edited by NDPA: Oct 12 2006, 09:06 PM

Well as far as my experience goes, phpBB is actually the best. Free as it comes, it has got a lot of features and most of them are customizable too. The best part is the skin changers. The themes could be changed by the users if permissions for such are granted and this I've noticed is a good way of adding that xtra tidbit interactivity to monotonously much interactive forums.

Hey!! Try This. A List of forum software at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of..._forum_software Enjoy!!

That version of IPB is no longer supported, and not available for legal download anymore. Plus it's not any near as spiffy as IPB 2.x series versions.
As BuffaloHELP mentioned above, SMF is a good alternative - even from the end-users view (meaning the forum part, not the admin console), it's more powerful, providing more features than phpBB (from my experience). But as he said, SMF doesn't have a ton of mods; although if you know PHP it's not terribly hard to make one.

You can use the mods on non default styles, it just says eg. "Find $Variable in ->templates->subsilver->overall_body.tpl" you just find $Variable in ->templates->your template->overall_body.tpl

The file structure is the same and all mods i have come across work on any template (some need minor modification but not many)

smf would probably be the best bet if you wanted free forum software. Like it was said previously, smf has a lot of mods that are rewritted to be able to be used for that specific forum, with many of the mods being originally on IPB forums. I had started to use an SMF but never kicked anything significant off on it, but I would highly recommend using it.

If you just want a free forum without a lot of work, try Razyboard. You can create a forum very easy, anyway you have several possibilities to adapt it to your vision. You can define the user ranks, define symbols for the different ranks, there is a control center in which you can manage your users, .... You can really adapt a lot of things! But it it possible to get really quick a forum. Perhaps you can use it.

Greetings, staph