I've just noticed this.



I must say you are mistaken, since IPB is not free. It was before, but now you have to pay for it. Nevertheless, there can still be found IPB versions that were once free, but they are illegal to download and use. However, if you aquired an IPB version when it was free, you have all rights to use it. The last one that was free was 2.0.0, but it could be found only for a short period, and it has "Trial" at the bottom (even though it is fully functional).

I like SMF as this the only free and professional looking bulletin board software.

Very familiar with phpBB. I can get what I need with easy modifications, and it has the right feel. I will agree that, by default, invision and vbulletin got more and very nice features and the phpBB dev team is quite slow (the newer version should have been here about 2 years ago orso, stopped following progress).

I would say that VBulletin is probably the top of the range, best forum software on the market... it has every feature you could want, is fully customisable and very professional.

On the other hand if you want a free forum software - you can't go past phpBB... it's fast, very customisable with heaps of features - and best of all - it's free!

Of course there are many other alternatives out there such as invision but you might just have to go and look around and find out which ones best for you.

As a chinese , I think Discuz is the best one. The function I like most is uploading video files without using your space!

For those as lucky as me, IPB 1.3 is a great forum software. The reason I said lucky is because it's no longer availible, however those that downloaded it during it's free period got a great piece of software. Aside from that, PhpBB is good, due to it being open source, and comes in second, SMF isn't fully open source, but's it's close and good enough for most people, and is secure and powerful, so I award it 3rd place, and that's all my opinions.