Forum software suggestions?

I’m about to start a forum for my games that Ive created, and I’m kind of stuck between choosing which forum solution to go with, so I thought i’d post here and ask if anyone has any input

So basically I need something that will tie in nicely with an existing user base, would be nice if I could customise the login script to authenticate through a different system for example.

Should be simple to show generated character avatars under every body’s name when they post, show their in game names, etc.

I was looking at XenForo, looked at vBulletin 4/5 but to be honest I wasnt very impressed with it (full of bugs!), and I also took a look at IPB.

I’d prefer to go with a paid solution (money isnt really an issue) but if there’s a free one that can do all the above (and looks nice) that would be great too!

Something that utilises a lot of ajax to save page reloads would also be a big plus.

And as a forum user, which solution would you prefer?

Discuss?

MyBB is nice. It has a lot of good existing plugins and it is very customizable. I’m also pretty sure that you’d be able to create your own login system for it. Ajax wise I don’t have a clue. Another big bonus is that it’s free. Definitely take a look at it.

Took a look at it, really don’t like the fact how they dont have a WYSIWYG editor. I expect many of my players to not be computer wizards so I doubt theyd know how to work with bbcode.

Im actually really close to purchasing a XenForo license, I think im really stuck between either XenForo or IPB now.

I recommend SMF - very powerful and customizable forum engine. It is not worth to buy forum engine when you have very good open source alternatives.

As I said, because of MyBB being a free software it has a lot of good plugins. Check the MyBB website, there’s a lot of options.
http://mods.mybb.com/view/wysiwyg-editor
http://mods.mybb.com/view/ckeditor-wysiwyg-editor

Whatever you do, keep the forum separate from the game server. Hosting a PHP forum that’s written without sql prepared statements is a sure way to get your entire LAMP stack hacked. All those forums are security holes with functionality on top. Oh, and don’t even consider SMF. I’ve seen the code, I’m not the man I used to be…

Yeah, the forums are hosted in a completely separate DB server, but i’ll still need read access to the AuthDB so I can perform login authentication.

Simple Machines looks like a Simple Nightmare…

768×229 7.62 KB

I ended up purchasing XenForo due to many reviews favouring it and to me a price of $140 USD for indefinite use, a year of support and a cheap renewal fee per year if I want updates seems very reasonable.

I didn’t want to go with a free solution because afaik paid solutions will and usually do patch up their holes quicker, have less security issues etc.

I was disgusted by the code in vBulletin 5, and I really despise the code in MyBB (downloaded latest one to take a look, doing evals to output templates…?). Didn’t even want to check PhpBB out because I thought it was just extremely ugly.

To me, XenForo is clean, it’s extensible, and just looking at the directory structure I can say that it’s organized extremely well.

I guess we’ll just need to see where this goes.

Thank you all for your replies!

You showed one of the best pieces of code in SMF :point: There is so much duplicated code (each with their distinct bug fixes) that modifying the simplest thing can take hours. Oh well, enough about my struggles with freeware.

Also, there are more nested tables than some browsers support. Just check the sourcecode of this very page.

Enjoy XenForo - never heard of it!

Haha, that’s the problem with free forums, they always seem to have issues. I can’t say vBulletin is any better than free forums though (now)

XenForo with it’s MVC & OOP seems like the cleanest forum script I’ve ever come across:

And it has zero tables, all layout is done with CSS

For $140 USD I think this was a steal.

Time to move forward