Phpbb2 - Free Forum

Best free forum out there with open source and easily customized. Here's a review taken from the website.

"What is phpBB?

phpBB is a high powered, fully scalable, and highly customizable Open Source bulletin board package. phpBB has a user-friendly interface, simple and straightforward administration panel, and helpful FAQ. Based on the powerful PHP server language and your choice of MySQL, MS-SQL, PostgreSQL or Access/ODBC database servers, phpBB is the ideal free community solution for all web sites.
Who are phpBB?

phpBB are a group of individuals based internationally who believe in Open Source software. The project has been stable since its creation in June 2000 without changes in licensing, leadership or corporate associations. Our goals remain unchanged and clear, to continue developing and supporting a stable, free, Open Source forum system.
Key Features

Supports popular database servers
Unlimited forums and posts
Multiple language interface
Private or public forums
Powerful search utility
Private messaging system
Complete customisation with templates
See the complete feature list... " (Quote taken from website)

To download phpbb2 go to the main website at http://www.phpbb.com/

You can also download skins for it, comes with alot of great skins and backgrounds. Posted this because it's my favorite host and ive been using it for about a year. I really don't think there are any better free forum scripts out there...

If I had to rate the difficulty i would say around medium

 

 

 

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Yes, phpBB free forum is good, in fact, it is very good, especially for personal websites that require a forum for non comercial purposes, just for share stuff like tools, programs, tutorials, ebooks, images, et cetera.

And i think there's a phpBB 3 coming out very soon, i am not sure when exactly.

But for comercial purposes, to create a higher impact to visitors, costumers and such, Vbulletin and Ipb are the most used, and it is easy to understand why, it has more features, functions, more things to attract more visitors, more members, and ultimatly more costumers as it is the top objective of online business persons.

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PhpBB is a lousy free forum software. Compared to YaBB, it has little features and gives you a difficult time to create your own theme. I'll bet PhpBB doesn't have the abilities that YaBB give you such as the ability to deny proxies access to your site and auto adds proxies that it detects.
XMB is a good forum software that is free, too. It's lightweight and perfect for a larger community. It's not like vBulletin, but it gives a decent feature list.
QuickSilver based on MercuryBoard is actually faster that PhpBB but isn't as good in features(which is easy to beat)

IPB 2 may not be free, but is is simply the best I've used. It's features make PhpBB look like nothing(come to think of it, PhpBB 2's panel is a clone of IPB 1.x's panel. IPB 2.x dramatically departs from that crappy frame based system). Simply upload a .gz file from the control panel and install a theme, with no messy FTP upload at all. Everything is improved, and great.

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