phpBB Vs. VB

Clash of the Titans, I've only used VBulletin as a member so I don't know what the admin and moderator panels are like but I doubt they are as good as phpbb's. What I do know is phpBB's are only going to get better. Maybe one of these days Greg may even be able to operate it. What a lot of people don't realize is the public areas are about 1/10 of the total package. The vast majority of phpBB is made up of the admin and moderator panels. Here's screenshot of both if anyone is interested.





As a user I'm still biased towards phpBB especially where the user control panel is concerned. Frankly I find VB's clunky to say the least. Might just be me which is why I'm posting this... what's everyone else think that has used both?

I don't do enough MODding on here to really justify a vote. I run my Mustang Forums (http://www.mach1registry.org/forums) with Vb and have learned a lot with it, the admin panels are not that hard, just much different then these.

They both seem to work well for what they do.

I have setup and used phpBBS and it is very easy to setup, especially if you have the cPanel Server and Fastastico installed. A few button clicks and it installed.

we run our car forum http://www.grandmarq.net with vb.......i find most things not hard to do

I used to moderate a forum using VB (until about two years ago so not so recent in computer-time) and it's very good forum software with excellent community support. The user functions and the moderator functions were both excellent and easy to use.

WNY wrote:I have setup and used phpBBS and it is very easy to setup, especially if you have the cPanel Server and Fastastico installed. A few button clicks and it installed.

Technically those installs are not supported by pbpBB because they have been burned in the past where the installer would alter the installation and cause problems. Besides installing manually only takes a few seconds as long as you know the database name, username and password.

I like IPB, but the only other board I have worked with is SMF.

ckf wrote:I like IPB, but the only other board I have worked with is SMF.

You can always give phpBB a whirl for free, there is converter for it but not officially supported:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1213555

Link for IPB conversion topic at the bottom.

Check out the execution time on the bottom, i just enabled it. Note i have eaccelerator installed on this server but I haven't tried to teakk it yet. without the execution is about .15 on most pages.

I don't manage any forums, but I am glad to see that you guys are using firebox for a browser. I finally upgraded to 3.04 on my Ubuntu box and like it a lot.

If you're doing anything with websites FF is almost essential... Firebug especially. I also have two other extensions I use a lot. One is an agent switcher because this forum detects bots and I use it with another tool for checking the headers to make sure Google is getting the right headers. For example if a regular user trys to go to forum that requires a login they get prompted for login, Google gets a accessed denied message with a proper 403. The message is standard, the 403 header is not.

Richard S. wrote:

ckf wrote:I like IPB, but the only other board I have worked with is SMF.

You can always give phpBB a whirl for free, there is converter for it but not officially supported:

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewtopi ... &t=1213555

Link for IPB conversion topic at the bottom.

Check out the execution time on the bottom, i just enabled it. Note i have eaccelerator installed on this server but I haven't tried to teakk it yet. without the execution is about .15 on most pages.

That is pretty fast. I just checked my SMF forum and got Page created in 0.145 seconds with 21 queries. I don't have any accelerators on my server. Maybe I'll do a bit of testing with phpBB and convert my SMF over if everything works ok. I'm not all that crazy about SMF.

I switched from phpBB to SMF about two years ago. I have less than 50 members so I don't even update the software. Get about 1 post every week. I was having issues with phpbb and bots so I switched.

ckf wrote:That is pretty fast. I just checked my SMF forum and got Page created in 0.145 seconds with 21 queries

Well there's a lot of variables in that. This is modified version and I'm doing some extra queries on each page. On a unmodified stock install the one developer was able to get it down to around .02 . the other thing to consider is what features are enabled... A stock install of of phpbb2 is 15X the amount yet has many less features.

cArNaGe wrote:I was having issues with phpbb and bots so I switched.

A stock phpbb2 install was notorious for that because the image captcha was something 99% breakable but I haven't had a spam bot on this forum since more than a year before switching to phpbb3. The last year I had phpbb2 I had a mod installed that asked a question. As far as phpbb3 goes there various tools available for blocking them. The front line of course is the improved image captcha which to date has not been broken, the captcha is adjustable and you could if you wanted turn it up to unreadable.

Some other features to stop them include:

• Minimum time for registration, e.g you can set the form to X amount of time before they can submit it.
• Tokens on the forms, they cannot bypass the standard procedure and directly submit the form without loading it first.
• Custom fields you can require to be filled in.
• Checks the IP against Blacklists on posting and Registration, you can also check the email that it has valid MX record.
• You can set a new registrants post to get bumped to a que for X amo8nt of posts.
• Othe than posting a message anything where a website link can placed can be hidden from bots so simply registering to get in the meberlist is not an option.

There's other things as well but the main tool is the captcha which I have no doubt will be broken at some point in time but the developers already have possible solutions when that happens. Image captcha is pretty much dead anyway. Human spammers are the next big thing and it's pretty big industry. There isn't really anything you can do to prevent them from registering. There is lot more coming in the future to address them as well.

One thing I'll note is there is three main things the developers are focusing on, security and performance. The security of phpBB has been outstanding, there has been no major exploits since it was launched more than a year ago.

I modded an oil forum a while back that used PHP. It didn't look like either of those, must be different skins. I don't really have any input about which one is the best, but one feature I really like is where you can scroll over a thread title and a popup will flash the first couple of sentences of a thread so you can see if you are interested before you open the link. When they first installed the feature I hated it because I used to scan the threads with my cursor. Once I learned to keep the cursor off of the title I came to love it.

PHP is a server side scripting language used to make phpBB.

The beauty about phpBB is I can add whatever I want but everything I add like that will slow it down. I could have hundreds of features but the scripts get bloated and consume a lot of resources. I have considered adding that feature however I probably won't unless there is an option to turn it off in the user control panel

There's a big giant list of features I can add here, if anything looks interesting let me know.

http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=69

Richard S. wrote:
A stock phpbb2 install was notorious for that because the image captcha was something 99% breakable but I haven't had a spam bot on this forum since more than a year before switching to phpbb3. The last year I had phpbb2 I had a mod installed that asked a question. As far as phpbb3 goes there various tools available for blocking them. The front line of course is the improved image captcha which to date has not been broken, the captcha is adjustable and you could if you wanted turn it up to unreadable.

Some other features to stop them include:

• Minimum time for registration, e.g you can set the form to X amount of time before they can submit it.
• Tokens on the forms, they cannot bypass the standard procedure and directly submit the form without loading it first.
• Custom fields you can require to be filled in.
• Checks the IP against Blacklists on posting and Registration, you can also check the email that it has valid MX record.
• You can set a new registrants post to get bumped to a que for X amo8nt of posts.
• Othe than posting a message anything where a website link can placed can be hidden from bots so simply registering to get in the meberlist is not an option.

There's other things as well but the main tool is the captcha which I have no doubt will be broken at some point in time but the developers already have possible solutions when that happens. Image captcha is pretty much dead anyway. Human spammers are the next big thing and it's pretty big industry. There isn't really anything you can do to prevent them from registering. There is lot more coming in the future to address them as well.

One thing I'll note is there is three main things the developers are focusing on, security and performance. The security of phpBB has been outstanding, there has been no major exploits since it was launched more than a year ago.

IPB had a problem with spammers a couple of months ago.

Various reports regarding spam bots have prompted a release of IP.Board 2.3.6. This upgrade includes improved CAPTCHA methods, specifically the integration of the third-party service http://recaptcha.net/.

As soon as we upgraded to the new version, the spamming stopped.

About a month ago the spammers started to attack SMF forums. I went in and set the captcha to the highest level and it took care of my problems. Others had to install the "are you human?" mod in order to stop the spamming.