Forum Software Reviews

Announcing Best Forum Software of 2012

lastnico — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 23:38:20 +0000

After an huge battle among all competitors all over the year 2012, we are proud to announce the final results of our yearly competition to promote the Best Forum Software, in the 3 following categories: Free, Commercial and Hosted.

With 190 comments posted and about 22.400 voters (50% more than last year), the least we can say is that the competition was this year again very popular... To finally end to an interesting result: all the best forum software of 2011 were reelected this year again!

It's now time to officially announce the results:

Best Free Forum Software: MyBB

MyBB tripled it! After earning the best free forum software category of 2010 and 2011, it was preferred against other forums by 3.585 readers, almost doubling the score of the second challenger phpBB.

Again, MyBB can thank its enthusiastic and dynamic community. MyBB 2.0 is still in development and we expect some big announcements for 2013.

Best Hosted Forum Service: ProBoards

With an amazing score of 10.742 votes, ProBoards wins for the second time the Best Hosted Forum Software Award of 2012.

With ProBoards version 5 official release getting closer and closer, providing tons of great and unique features making ProBoards the most advanced hosted forum service on the market, we do certainly understand why it got so many votes.

Best Commercial Forum Software: Burning Board

For the second time, Burning Board wins the Best Commercial Forum Software award, more over against big competitors like XenForo, vBulletin and IP.Board. Even if this is not the most known and used commercial forum software, its features, its development framework and unique style give a fresh view from Europe of what a forum software could be.

You can also consult the dedicated Best Forum Software of 2012 page for more details.

... And 2013 has just started!

So, start immediately voting for your favorite software on the new dedicated page for electing the Best Forum Software of 2013!

ProBoards v5 on BetaZone and Support Forum

lastnico — Thu, 29 Nov 2012 23:10:57 +0000

The ProBoards so expected version 5 official release is getting closer and closer. A big step in the release plan has indeed been reached by migrating the Support forum officially to v5, and with the opening of BetaZone gates.

BetaZone is indeed a specific and temporary place where ProBoards Forum Community Managers can start migrating their forums to version 5, and test the final result. We however do not know yet if this is just for a temporary testing or if these forums are migrated once forever. BetaZone requires an Access Key, most probably to gradually doing the migration of forums and allowing the ProBoards technical team to do the testing and the checking their new platform.

ProBoards version 5 is a massive rethinking of what a forum software should be in 2012 (well, 2013 too , including tons of great features like:

Ultra fast Search feature, matching threads updated immediately on the current page
A entirely redesigned Administration Panel, including great ergonomic improvements like auto added entries
A great flexible and robust template engine allowing community managers to tune the appearance and the content of their forum
Support for Global Accounts, giving the possibility to have a single account on all ProBoards based forums
And much more improvements, that I let you discover through their Support forum...

IP.Board Demo License Key Revoked

lastnico — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 00:40:32 +0000

Two days ago, we received a mail from Lindy Throgmartin, CEO of IP.Board, asking us to remove the IP.Board demo, our license key being revoked.

Apparently, you cannot do whatever you want with their software, including letting unknown users accessing the Administration Panel. Indeed, he argues the demo was not updated for a long time (this is wrong, we updated it the 28th of April), and second, that our license key was stolen and used somewhere else.

First, Invision Power is regularly checking the matching between license keys and URLs (thank you for privacy), which makes it really easy to track bad usages of license keys and to disable a forum with a single click in their user management tool.

Second, a license key number is not what you paid for, you paid for a service, so this license key should be regenerated within a single click in case of theft, and the previous one should simply be revoked.

Anyway, fortunately, this was a demo forum, nothing critical, but I would not be happy if one day I would receive such an email as a big community administrator, telling me I have 24 hours to migrate my content, users and so on to a new forum software, just because Invision Power decided to make your life harder. Think about this twice before using proprietary software, as IP.Board.

For the time being though, no more IP.Board demo, but, fortunately, you still have many additional great software to test: XenForo, MyBB, vBulletin, SMF, phpBB,...

Techniques for dilution, misdirection and control of Internet forum

lastnico — Fri, 03 Aug 2012 00:52:12 +0000

Recently, an interesting document was revealed by Cryptome, a website, similar to Wikileaks, which tries to publish documents states and private companies have kept secret. This document, named The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies (spooks, feds, etc.) is about how to spy, misdirect, dilute and create disinformation on Internet forums. After reading it, you might probably notice that you already encountered such attempts on your forum, and that, maybe, your forum has several members being counterproductive and making everything to muffle your voice and the voice of your community.

In addition to giving some tips about how to disinform, track and spot people doing it, the original author, from the form COINTELPRO US agency, explains 6 techniques about manipulating a community and its forum:

Forum Sliding: Consists of posting many new threads to pollute and make a sensitive and critical thread disappearing in dozen of useless content.
Consensus Cracking: Using several accounts, you would post as a user an information which looks good, but that has some weaknesses. Step by step, with another account, you will argue and prove that the original post is not as good as it looks, and the involved community will start trusting you and following your positions.
Topic Dilution: A bit similar to Forum Sliding, the goal here is to dillute the topic of a sensitive thread by being totally off-topic or start arguing on different/minor things. At the end, the trolls might start, and the original topic is going to be forgotten.
Information Collection: By giving some fake information about yourself, some members might start replying you about their personal information about the same topic. You can be even smarter by indirectly getting these information, for instance, talking about a car brand just to know how many persons use a car.
Anger Trolling: If you try to know who are the posters the most inclined to violence, you can start pushing themselves to act like this by intentionally posting a bad (racist, intolerant) topic. By the way, you can convince shy persons to act by posting with fake accounts multiple anger messages, just to show them everybody is involved in replying in a bad way to the original poster.
Gaining Full Control: After playing a long time with the previous techniques, you can start being considered as a relevant and gain the confidence of the forum administrator, reaching the forum moderator status. With these credentials, you can unobtrusively start moderating or removing sensitive topics, and, in a long perspective, try to shut down the forum by making it non interesting any longer.

Of course, the goal here is not to encourage people using these techniques, but have you already noticed such behavior on your forums? Do you still fight against this?

New Features for Forum for Pages Facebook plugin

lastnico — Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:12:52 +0000

Last October, we introduced you the Forum for pages product, a Facebook plugin integrating a nice forum software into your Facebook page.

This product was particularly useful since Facebook was planning to remove its official Forum application.

Forum for Pages - Main Topics Page

Forum for Pages - Timeline Homepage

Back to present, Forum for pages has continued evolving and got more and more features, including:

12 new languages: Arabic, Catalan, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish & Turkish
Notifications on Facebook when a topic is updated
Embedding images and videos in posts
Text Formatting
Blacklisting of keywords
Possibility to migrate forum to another Facebook page
Tags inside discussion topics
Search feature
Admins can ban abusive users from the forum
Automatically repost new topics to the Timeline for better virality
Liking a post

Additionally, this extension now contains a Premium version, that mainly removing advertisements, but also including nice features well suited for companies and official brands:

Full integration with Google Analytics
Integration with an external website using an RSS feed
Personalization of the forum using a custom banner
Free of any advertising

For those whom it concerns, this Premium version starts at $5 per month, which is really cheap when you think about the communities and great potential Facebook has.

Forum for Pages - Admin Settings Premium

Forum for Pages - Inside a topic thread

As usual, after the deletion of Facebook forum, the famous quote "Nature abhors a vacuum" cannot be more true.

Forum Comparator gets a Nice Refresh

lastnico — Sat, 31 Mar 2012 21:54:15 +0000

It's been a long time without any news here... But don't worry, we are still here, and, to give you some clues about this, let's introduce the new Forum Comparator selector. Much more simpler and lighter than the previous huge & horrible yellow block, this comparator allows you selecting your forums directly through a tooltip. To add a more forums to the comparison, simply click on the + Select of a free column to compare it with current software.

New Forum Comparator Selector Screenshot

During the revamping of this interface, we've also implemented a feature you have waited for a long time: the ability to compare forums only on their differences! Tick the Show Differences Only on a current comparison, and features shared by compared forums are removed, letting you discovering real differences between bulletin boards.

I cannot leave you without the traditional link to the comparator, initializing it to a really popular search: MyBB vs Simple Machines 2 vs XenForo.

As usual, do not hesitate to report your feedback and bugs (bugs?!?, really?) using the Contact page.

Personal Note: Going to be a Daddy soon may probably slow down a bit the number of news and reviewed forums, but, do not worry so much, I will still be here for you all too!

Twelvestone Review and Demo Available

lastnico — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:23:50 +0000

Twelvestone has just been reviewed, and this test is available at Twelvestone Review.

Additionally, we have also installed it on our sandbox environment to let you test and discover this software via the Twelvestone Demo.

Beautiful and Simple, Modern and Responsive, Twelvestone is a new hosted forum solution we are eager to review.

You can consult it here :

The Grand List of Forum and Community Laws

lastnico — Fri, 06 Jan 2012 00:40:30 +0000

Some fun for the beginning of 2012 with the famous Grand List of Forum and Community Laws, that basically sums up how, what and why most Internet Communities are going to react on a given event.

I cannot resist about giving you an excerpt of this long list of 151 bullets (and counting!, web rules regularly evolves :

"FIRST POST!":
In any "response to a new installment of something" thread, there is 74.3% chance that the first post will include the poster stating that they got the first post. At least half the time, the post will consist only of the "I got the first post!" comment, and nothing of any use.
Corollary: On more popular sites, the first five to ten posts will consist of the above, either by posters who aimed for the first post but missed, or continuing the chain by posting "second!" "third!" and so on.
Corollary 2: The more people who continue identifying their post order, the more likely it will spark an argument with the other users complaining about how much they hate people who do this.
Page Break Effect:
Unless the final post of the previous page is quoted, the post will usually be forgotten
Atheismo's Law:
If you talk about religion, it will lead to debate.
Politico's Law:
Any mention of politics will trigger a debate.
Corollary: The longer said debate goes on, the less likely it is to ever be resolved or end.
...

See the complete list here: The Grand List of Forum and Community Laws and enjoy!

Announcing Best Forum Software of 2011

lastnico — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 01:04:20 +0000

After a huge battle among all competitors all over the 2011 year, we are proud to announce the final results of our yearly competition to promote the Best Forum Software, in the 3 following categories: Free, Commercial and Hosted.

With 146 comments posted and more than 14.500 voters, the competition was this year really intense and popular. So popular that the poll was even attacked by a bot swarm that tried to elect at the last second different forum software.

It's now time to officially announce the results:

Best Free Forum Software: MyBB

MyBB doubled it! After earning the best free forum software category of 2010, it was selected by 2294 readers as the best free forum of 2011. After a lively fight during the year against phpBB and YaBB, MyBB finished the course with a large gap (temporarily reduced due to a bot attack fortunately stopped

MyBB can thank its really enthusiastic and dynamic community, providing more and more help, assistance and content (plugins, themes,...) to the MyBB team. With the next MyBB 2.0 in heavy development, we are confident that we will discuss about MyBB all over 2012 too!

Best Hosted Forum Service: ProBoards

For the first time, and with the brilliant score of 2635 voters (best performance among all categories), ProBoards is the winner of the Best Hosted Forum Software award of 2011.

The least we can say is that ProBoards definitely deserves this award, after a great score on its review and above all because of the huge community around this hosted forum.

ProBoards is a great hosting solution that provides forum pages for free to everyone since 2000, almost 12 years from now!

Best Commercial Forum Software: Burning Board

Burning Board, the renown forum product from Germany, finally reached the first place in the Best Commercial Forum Software category, with the impressive score of 2335 voters. Even if Burning Board is not the most known forum software all over the world, it is definitely a product that is worth it, and that provides a really great list of features and additional products around the Burning Board core.

You can also consult the dedicated Best Forum Software of 2011 page for more details.

... And 2012 has just started!

So, start immediately voting for your favorite software on the new dedicated page for electing the Best Forum Software of 2012!

SocialEngine Review and Demo Available

lastnico — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 23:35:11 +0000

We are really proud to announce the release of our review of the SocialEngine software. SocialEngine could be considered as the future of all modern PHP platforms, providing a great base, aka SocialEngine core, that could be extended by many additional services and plugins. One of the main goal here is to keep the "social" word as a central concept for every single features developed and available.

As usual, a software license has been gracefully donated to FSR in order to let you do your usual testing on our sandbox environment: SocialEngine Demo.

You can consult it here :

NitPick 2011 Anonymous Image Board Reviewed

lastnico — Thu, 24 Nov 2011 00:40:52 +0000

This is the first time we review an Imageboard software, and we start with the new Nitpick 2011. You probably know the famous 4chan website, that also relies on the same concept: provide an easy way for people to discuss and share pictures with other members. If this is what you are looking for, you are not going to be disappointed with Nitpick 2011, if not, maybe its design could surprise you a bit.

Export the Facebook Discussion Board with Forum for pages

lastnico — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 00:01:51 +0000

As we reported it on a previous news, Facebook is planning to remove the Discussion Boards app from all Facebook pages on October 31th, including all previous discussions, topics and messages. Fortunately, a small Irish company, Pixode Ltd, has released a new application, called Forum for pages for Facebook, providing a basic forum software for this social network AND allowing you to migrate your data from the old Discussion Board app to this one.

If you want to see it right now, our Facebook page was migrated to this new application.

Here is how to backup and keep a forum on your own Facebook page:

First, go to the Facebook website, and open the Forum for pages application homepage.
Once there, click on the button Add Forum to your page.

Forum for pages Facebook Application
As usual, you will have to confirm your choice by clicking on Add Forum to your page.

Add Forum for pages Confirmation
Now that the Forum for pages application is installed, you can already create new topics, and play around with it. In order to migrate your previous discussions from the Discussion Boards app, there is a specific button Import existing discussions on which you are, obviously, eager to click.

Import Existing Discussions
After waiting some seconds (could be several minutes, depending on the size and the activity of your forum), the Forum for pages application will be filled with the previous discussions. This is it, your content is safe now!

Newly Imported Topics
As any existing topic, you can navigate through them and comment them, as before. Forum for pages is of course a bit basic, but, still, is a more rich forum software when you compare it with the ongoing removed Bulletin Board application.

A Topic in Forum for pages

Note that the P&O Cruises Australia company was able to save more than 4000 discussions using this solution, so it looks very stable and functional. By the way, do not wait too long, because this trick will not work anymore after the 1st of November 2011, where this old Bulletin Boards application will be removed!

If you want to review this application before migration, go to our Facebook page.

Forum Press Review - October 2011

lastnico — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 23:06:24 +0000

Here we are for our monthly press review of October 2011:

Invision Power Services was really active during September, releasing their eCommerce and business management application IP.Nexus 1.3.2, their search engine optimization tool IP.SEO 1.5.1, and a development version of IP.Board 3.2.3.
Internet Brands is also celebrating a new release of vBulletin 4.1.7.
Please remember upgrading your MyBB installation to 1.6.4, which integrates a fix of a security vulnerability. Note that MyBB 1.6.5, that will be the next version with new features, seems getting closer to release. The MyBB Merge System is also upgraded to 1.6.2, fixing 21 bugs mostly for PunBB, IPB, phpBB, SMF and vBulletin importations.
After celebrating their first anniversary, the XenForo team is working hard on the next major version 1.1, that will provide many features like custom profile fields, Admin Control Panel search feature, auto-embedding media resources, notices, thread prefixing, right-to-left language support and many more!
Single-Sign-on is finally included into Vanilla. For this feature to be supported on your forum, you will have to select among the two following plugins: ProxyConnect or jsConnect.
Finally, the two competitors FluxBB and PunBB gained a +1 on their respective version number, mostly for fixing security issues

Happy reading, and enjoy the coming week-end!

Facebook Removes Discussion Board App From Pages

lastnico — Tue, 04 Oct 2011 00:05:19 +0000

Facebook has decided to remove all Discussion Boards from Pages on October 31th, 2011. This is a real sad news for Facebook Pages managers, that are going to lose thousands of topics and messages that were stored in this really popular Facebook Page Application, that reached 54 million users per month during its most active period.

Facebook Discussion Board on Pages

This top score has unfortunately slowly decreased since, reaching 27 million users in December 2010, and recently 22 million users, which is still considerable, but seems not enough from the point of view of Facebook.

The plan for Facebook to counter this decreasing is simply to remove the application from all existing Pages, claiming that the Page Wall is a more comfortable place for commenting and discussing, with a better visibility to page fans and visitors.

How to export / backup your Facebook Discussion Board Topics and Messages?

Right now, Facebook is unfortunately not providing any way to migrate data which is really silly. There is still one month before the final cleanup, so hopefully, Facebook developer team will provide us a way to export to any JSON/XML format these data, in order to reimport them, either on the Wall of the page, or into any other Facebook-connected forum like XenForo or MyBB.

If you do not know this quite limited (but fully integrated with Facebook, obviously) discussion boards, maybe you should do a tour on our Facebook Forum Software Reviews Page Discussion Boards.

bbPress 2.0 released

lastnico — Sun, 25 Sep 2011 22:29:08 +0000

Two years after version 1.1, bbPress is finally out! This forum plugin of the famous Wordpress blog software got really nice improvements since the last version, including: better integration with Wordpress, as they use now the same dashboard, and both blogs and forums are now more tight. Wordpress themes are really more simple to adjust to the forum layout, and the general stability is really now a step forward.

bbPress is a simple forum software supporting user profiles, topic tags, notifications, Akismet antispam,... and brings this for free to any Wordpress installation version 3.2.1.

Additionally, bbPress is really coupled with another popular Wordpress plugin called BuddyPress, which basically brings many social networks features to your Wordpress blog. BuddyPress 1.5 was recently released, while bbPress 2.0 final touch was brought to make them working perfectly together. To sum up, these two plugins can really give too your personal blog a nice social network orientation!

For bbPress 1.x users, a dedicated bbPress Importer is available for migrating your data to this new version. Our bbPress review should be updated really soon to celebrate and test this version extensively. Stay tuned!

Answerbase Review and Demo Available

lastnico — Sat, 17 Sep 2011 17:17:05 +0000

Answerbase has just been reviewed, and this test is available at AnswerBase Review.

This Q&A Software could easily be assimilated to a different kind of forum software. These software are indeed very popular for several years, and many successful websites are based on this concept (Yahoo Answers, Stack Overflow,...).

This review should definitely help you to see if Answerbase can fulfill your requirements.

You can consult it here :

FUDForum 3.0.3: 10 Year Anniversary

lastnico — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 08:29:47 +0000

FUDForum team is proud to announce version 3.0.3 of its forum software. This release also celebrates the tenth birthday of FUDForum, initially created in 2001.

This release provides nice new improvements:

Default forum templates are now HTML 5.
Minimum requirements are now PHP >= 5.2 and MySQL 5.
Global Announcements, displayed on front page.
New databases supported: Firebird, DB2 and Microsoft SQL Server.
Multiple attachments uploading in a row.

For the complete list of features and modifications, see the official FUDForum 3.0.3 release page.

Forum Press Review - September 2011

lastnico — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 23:29:02 +0000

Following the idea of last month, we are back for a small tour of news published all over the forum software planet.

IP.Board software suite got a +1. Almost all software from Invision Power were upgraded to an newer version, including IP.Board, IP.Gallery, IP.Chat, IP.Blog and IP.Download.
And the same feeling of starting the school year applies for Woltlab software, as Burning Board 3.1.6, Community Blog 1.1.1 and Community Gallery 1.1.1 were released as well.
vBulletin iPhone Application was upgraded to 1.1.3. It now includes the famous Twitter feature "drag to refresh" and an improved pagination bar.
Do not forget to upgrade your Phorum installation with the latest security fix included in version 5.1.7.
FUDForum's next version is approaching with the release of 3.0.3RC2, including command line tools for manually loading mails and NNTP posts, new CAPTCHA images, support of Google CDN plugin, and several improvements in ACP Avatar page, Forum Files editor...
bbPress major revamp is still in progress with 2.0RC4 that went out recently. Major improvements are Akismet integration, update process, multisite integration and integration of BuddyPress 1.5 activity streams and @mentions.

FusionBB Review and Demo Available

lastnico — Thu, 01 Sep 2011 21:29:36 +0000

It's was a long time since the last review, but today, we are reviewing a commercial PHP forum software, called FusionBB. This review is available at FusionBB Review.

Additionally, we have also installed it on our sandbox environment to let you test and discover this software via the FusionBB Live Demonstration.

You can consult it here :

Release of FluxBB 1.4.6

lastnico — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 23:10:49 +0000

The FluxBB team is proud to announce the release of FluxBB 1.4.6, closing 49 bugs and issues, and improving the forum software in the following domains:

Many performance improvements
Search in multiple forums is now allowed.
All mail templates are now translatable.
New BBCodes for referring a topic, a post, a forum or user.

You can, as usual, download FluxBB at their Download Page or following the Upgrade Instructions.

Mobile Platform Not As Important As Standard Browser

lastnico — Sat, 20 Aug 2011 09:03:11 +0000

After our ~~tiny~~ small poll regarding the mobile platform, it seems forums and mobiles are still not deeply linked now. Most community managers care and think their forums should be connected and usable with mobiles, but do not consider it as the main platform to target.

Historically, we can actually notice that forum software were always a case apart in Internet evolution: they were the first masterpiece of what we call now the participatory and collaborative Internet (aka Web 2., long time before any guest was able to comment a news, an article on any website. You can think for example about the huge count of news site that propose their members to discuss about an article right into a connected (and automatically created) topic in their site forum.

However, at the opposite, it took long before social networks were deeply integrated into our forum topics and threads... And actually, when we are talking about integration, it's more a classical Addthis toolbar you will see giving a simple way for users to share a given topics. The next revolution of a single and merged identity on Internet is probably the next big step our forum software will have to pass (several of them already did it: IP.Board, Xenforo,...), so maybe the mobile revolution will raise after this one.

How Is The Mobile Platform On Your Forum?

lastnico — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 23:21:11 +0000

Most of my community members post using a smartphone.

14% (1 vote)

I ensure most mobile phones are supported using plugins.

14% (1 vote)

As far as I remember, web pages looked compatible.

43% (3 votes)

This platform is not relevant for my community.

14% (1 vote)

Forums will never need to be compatible mobile phones.

14% (1 vote)

Total votes: 7

Phorum 5.2.16 Review

lastnico — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 18:27:24 +0000

Phorum review has been updated and refreshed to take into account changes between Phorum version 5.2.10 and 5.2.16. Two years passed since the last update was made, so it's unnecessary to say it was really needed...

SMF 2 Review Updated

lastnico — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 22:44:02 +0000

Three months after one of the most expected release in the forum software world for 2011, we are happy to announce a refresh of our Simple Machines review, to update information according to the new version 2.0, that was released fall of June 2011. Without no debate and questions, SMF keeps the perfect score of 10/10, putting it in the list of best - and free - existing forum software.

Note we also reinstalled the SMF demo as well, if you want to test the application directly.

20 Years Ago, First Website Was Launched

lastnico — Tue, 09 Aug 2011 00:32:31 +0000

Last Saturday, the 6th of August 2011, 20 years exactly have passed since the first website ever was launched. Many people, including the CERN, in Switzerland, where Internet was born, consider March 1989 the moment when the concept of Internet was introduced. However, it took a bit more than two years to implement everything and launch the first Web site of Internet: http://info.cern.ch.

The funny link with forums is that the Web protocol, that, at the beginning was simply HTTP + an embryo of HTML for formatting the content and define the concept of hyperlinks, is a quite young protocol, since it was invented in 1991, while the Usenet protocol, that we consider as the ancestor of Web Forums we know, was actually older, as it was created 12 years before the other.

It helps us reminding that, even if Internet is now more or less equals to Web for most people, Usenet protocol and communicating using forums on top of Usenet were one of the first brick of what Internet was at the beginning.

Just as a reminder, here are the official dates of creation of Internet protocols:

1969: Internet
1971: FTP
1971/1972: Email (POP)
1979: Newsgroups
1979: Usenet
1988: IRC
1991: Web

Surprisingly, even IRC is older than the Web protocol!

Do you like new Forum Software Reviews look?

lastnico — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 05:01:22 +0000

I love it!

62% (16 votes)

I like it

12% (3 votes)

I dislike it

8% (2 votes)

I find it overloaded / too colorful

15% (4 votes)

I don't like this website anyway

4% (1 vote)

Total votes: 26

Discover FSR with a New Look

lastnico — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 13:29:12 +0000

I am proud to announce and release this new version of Forum Software Reviews, after 3 months of hard work to get it ready for today.

It includes many changes, that I could not be all listed here, but here are the main improvements:

Forum Reviews are single page now. Most Internet connections are fast enough today for loading a small bunch of 10 Kb HTML content. Search are now easier in this page.
Home page has now an inline forum comparator, perfect to quickly look and compare major features of each bulletin board.
Screenshots Galleries are now really better in terms of ergonomy and ease of use.
FSR should load faster, as either most images are in sprites or their count was simply reduced. (+ our recent server change)
Improved ways to share links with your community... Including a Google +1 button on top of the page, so please be kind enough to +1 us if you like FSR.
... and many other changes, but I let you find them by yourself

I hope these changes will suit your need and are in the way of improving your experience in finding the best forum software for your community. By the way, if anything goes wrong, or if you see any bug, do not hesitate to report them to us.

Forum Press Review of August 2011

lastnico — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 06:13:14 +0000

Here is an excerpt of recent news regarding forum software:

phpBB supports the famous ColorizeIt service. It will now be really easy to test and customize your phpBB forum theme in few clicks.
vBulletin 4.1.5 available for download. 4 days later, the first security patches have followed. Remember to regularly upgrade your forum version.
Advanced Electron Forum goes Open Source. After some thoughts and the fact that contributors were more and more rare, the development team decided to switch to a more permissive license. Note that as it is custom, we do not know yet if it is compatible with the definition of the OSI.
FreeForums introduces VIP Memberships, that provides additional features and accesses to community members paying $19.95/year for this. Forum owner gets 50% of this amount, the other part going to FreeForums hoster. A really good way to earn revenue as a forum community manager.
UBB.threads 7.6 planned for 6/8 weeks. Finally, it seems it will be released soon, which is a really good news.
FUDForum 3.0.3 RC1 is released. Among changes, you will probably notice the usage of HTML 5 templates, supports for DB2, MS-SQL and Firebird databases, and more and more new languages (>50).

Something else did not spot on our radar? Post it in the comments.

Edit: And a news from the past joined the list, as PunBB speaks Icelandic since 2003. My
apologizes...

FUDForum 3.0.2 Reviewed (again)

lastnico — Thu, 05 May 2011 00:06:04 +0000

Again, an old review is updated! This time, it's for FUDForum review to be updated again.

FUDForum is definitely still in the race of pure forum software, that clearly want to demonstrate what a forum is in the spirit of most people. Have a look at the FUDForum Review to discover why!

We also decide to increase its score, reaching 8 out of 10!

XenForo Review and Demo Available

lastnico — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 18:51:34 +0000

XenForo has just been reviewed, and this test is available at XenForo Review.

Additionally, we have also installed it on our sandbox environment to let you test and discover this software via the XenForo Live Demonstration.

XenForo, the forum that created the most buzz last year has finally announced its final version one week ago. It is a good opportunity to see what former vBulletin developers were able to succeed with XenForo.

You can consult it here :