TexasCHLforum.com

I know we have several other forum operators here on this forum.

Recommend a new forum package to me.

History: I've run a niche subject forum for over ten years. We've been on one package for 8 years, but the application has suffered a serious glitch and the vendor is 'too busy with other projects' to bother troubleshooting it. So much for that yearly maintenance fee.

Size: 22k members with about 216k posts. What makes my forum a bit unique is that while the per day volume isn't high, we have large number of sub forums (300!) and the old posts don't get locked. The forum has a history focus.

Tech requirements: We've been running an ASP.NET 4.5 / MSSQL, SQL 2012 Express setup but I have nothing against PHP and MySQL solutions.

Feature: I'd like something that will do some content management outside of pure forum activities but it's not required.

Old db: It's intact, but I'm going to have to bribe a SQL guy to do a custom import for me. I don't expect the package we currently run to be out-of-the-box importable to any new solution.

There are several available with vBulletin being the most popular commercial program and phpBB the most popular open source program. Obviously, I'm running phpBB and I considered converting to vBulletin for a few added features. (This was before the new phpBB software was available.) I decided against it for two reasons. First, importing the phpBB database was very problematic, in spite of what vBulletin claimed. Photos and other attachments were not going to work, nor were some if not all links. That alone killed the deal. Then I found that vBulletin website have suffered far more hacking/disabling/damage from hackers any other bulletin board software.

I'm happy with the feature set of the new phpBB, so I'm especially happy I didn't make the change.

Chas.

I've been using UBBThreads since it's inception. It uses php and mysql. Before that I used the UBB board software, which used perl and mysql. It's actively maintained, and handles 750,000 posts and 39,000 users with no problems at all. You can view it here: www.stovebolt.com/ubbthreads/ubbthreads.php. I don't think there is a forum software that does CMS. That's an entirely different functionality. The UBB address is www.ubbcentral.com. I have seen a number of security-related patches in board updates, but I'm not aware of the software ever having been hacked.

If you want to start with a publishing capability as well as forum software, you can install Joomla, and then install the Kunena Forum component extension: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions ... rum/kunena

Here is a wiki on different forum software packages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compariso ... m_software