I need to know which is the best and most suitable BBS to my site which has little hosting space?
i need it not to take a lot of space, can be customised easily by adding my site logo instead of original logo, can be controlled easily so members could be edited, banned, removed easily "a lot of spammers are around nowdays ", also i want it to be arabic supported if possible but it's not a condition, it's just an option ofcourse it should be easily installable from Cpanel or Fantastico features.
Thanks for helping.

You will get different responses from this...

Do you want to have a paid BBS or a free one? I will mention all the popular alternatives.

SimpleMachines - I personally use this one since it's free and does what I want easily. It's included in Fantastico already, so you can install it directly there if you wish to give it a test run. Arabic language is supported. Logo should be easy to edit as well. Also, tech support there is free and usually someone will have an answer to the problem

vBulletin - This is a paid package and is probably one of the most customizable BBS out there. It has lots of hacks/mods that you can install. Lots of settings to change. I would say that this is not for a novice user who just began using BBS. Price is not that cheap either, but if it does what you want, it's worth it. I adminstrated a vB forum before, so I'm not sure how difficult it is to change the logo, etc. But I doubt it's that complicated

InvisionBoard - This is one of my personal favorites. If it wasn't for the price tag and some of the features it was missing that I liked (in SimpleMachines), I would have probably converted. This is also a commercial BBS. You might find it more friendly to use that vBulletin. If you want to give it a trial run, they do have a free version for users to use here. There are some limitations, but you should be able to get the feel of it.

QUOTE(WeaponX @ Mar 6 2006, 10:00 AM)

You will get different responses from this...

Do you want to have a paid BBS or a free one? I will mention all the popular alternatives.

SimpleMachines - I personally use this one since it's free and does what I want easily. It's included in Fantastico already, so you can install it directly there if you wish to give it a test run. Arabic language is supported. Logo should be easy to edit as well. Also, tech support there is free and usually someone will have an answer to the problem

I would like to get different responses so i could make a good point of view before moving into installing any of them, i tried phpbb2 and it is really bad, i think its support for arabic language is really so bad, also it hasn't a good control panel while you use it in arabic, don't know if it's like that in other languages or not but never tried it in english, i always used to use xoop but in english forums not in arabic forums.
i think i will give SM a try, i never tried it before so i think it deserve a try, i hope everything will be ok, if it's like what you said then the matter will be the space, i will check to see how much space does it need.
thanks for helping.

This post has been edited by XIII: Mar 6 2006, 01:48 AM

All the bulleting board system need little space, but that shouldn't be the main factor. As WeaponX said, SMF is the best for your needs. If you don't want to pay for a BBS, you are left with SMF and phpBB.

phpBB is full of holes and even I can crack it. You can find bunch of tutorials on doing this, and a lot of people do it just out of fun. So, stay away from phpbb if you don't want to be annoyed.

On the other hand, SMF is great. Personally, I don't like it, I prefer IPB, which I use, but it is great. It is rather customizable and I believe there is a fair number of modifications. What's even better, there's almost no way to crack it. At least it can't be found online easily. So if you SMF get's cracked, know that it has been done by a professional who can probably crack all BBSs

QUOTE(pyost @ Mar 6 2006, 05:27 PM)

All the bulleting board system need little space, but that shouldn't be the main factor. As WeaponX said, SMF is the best for your needs. If you don't want to pay for a BBS, you are left with SMF and phpBB.

phpBB is full of holes and even I can crack it. You can find bunch of tutorials on doing this, and a lot of people do it just out of fun. So, stay away from phpbb if you don't want to be annoyed.

On the other hand, SMF is great. Personally, I don't like it, I prefer IPB.

It didn't work with me, for more than 3 times it crashs and i lose my saved data, like profile data, how much does IPB cost?, isn't there any other free solution but SMF?, what about content managers?, is there anyother solution between them?, i used xoop before, it's good, but it doesn't support arabic fonts though SMF and phpBB do, really so confused with that

vBulletin and IPB are not what you are looking for. They have thousands of features and the result is a heavy database and space load.

I would personally recommend PHPBB or SMF. You could also try the several other smaller ones out there.

Yes, you could use another free forum software that is also used by www.proboards.com. It is not as good as the ones before, but is free and quite secure.

And phpBB should be avoided as much as it can.

Do a google for free forum software etc. and you'll get some different results. I'd agree that phpBB and SMF are the most popular free ones. You could host a SMF remotely but I don't know if you could install the languages if you did that. If you want to host it remotely try www.smfhost.com or google. Hope this helps you out

i'll try to get a free, light and secured one, but i want to know if astahost will allow me to set up it on my account?

To my knowledge, Astahost allows any kinds of discussion board systems on hosted site.


Personally, I would recommend SMF. I have lot of experience with phpBB and I got fed up to it because of the security issues (need for constant upgrading) and the lack of basic features that I think a BBS should have (for example, sub categories). PhpBB has mods for nearly all possible features but they make upgrading a living hell.

VBulleting and IPB are nice systems but they cost money while at least for me SMF more than enough. Why pay for features that you don't need.