Hi guys and gals I need to offer a forum on my website but I don't know of the best providers, I wonder if you would be kind enough to give your experience of forum peeps.. thanks! liesa xx
Providers as in free forums that are hosted by them, or a forum software that you can install on your site? PHPbb and SMF are my favourite (They need to be installed on your site) PHPbb is very customizable if you know HTML/CSS and it's very managable, however it takes quite a bit of trial and error to get used to the admin control panel. SMF is customizable too, but you will need to know PHP to do some changes (Such as move the navbar buttons around). The ACP is a lot easier to get your head around and it makes thing much simpler if you are fine with using a premade theme (You can easily make a new banner/header). FreeForum and PowerBoards are forums that you can set up, but are not hosted by you.
IPB (free version) is another free one - there is a commercial version as well, but the free version is pretty good. phpBB is not very secure in comparison to SMF and IPB.
There is no IPB free version unless you're talking about 1.3. I would recommend the IPB paid (newest version). I use it for my forum and it's great. You can also get it hosted on their servers.
