HEXUS forum software

[Splash]

I read that there were some problems with SMF:

"SMF is another open source forum software which had eveloved from YaBB. I had the opportunity to use it last year and found it having most of the features that I want (including attachments and sub forums out of the box). Mods can be installed easily and be reverted back to a certain stage if you decided that you won’t use it anymore.

The bad thing about it is that most mods are written for the default theme so if you’re using a custom theme, good luck as you will need to look through the code and do some manual tweaking to get a mod working in your custom theme. I also hate the fact that the themes are still using Smartly-like template tags which can be a show-stopper for those who came from a pure (x)html/css background.

Besides, some mods don’t even play nice with each other, and once they are installed side by side, it can be too late for you to disable the mod and revert back to a previous state before the mod was installed. This was really what frustrated me. If I had to do it again, my advice would be to use everything out of the box and just let the forum grow before doing anything fancy."

http://www.davidtan.org/compare-foru...a-and-bbpress/

Any comments?

Hans L

Personally... tweaking custom templates ain't all that hard. And you should *always* backup before making a change anyways, right? I moved from using IPB to SMF as it seemed senseless paying for something on the scale I was using, and SMF seems at least to be a tad more responsive on my cheapy shared hosting.

As for Smarty - it's pretty popular for a good reason.

[DavidM]

Agreed: Smarty is not much more trickier then html to work with - but has the advantage of logic as well.

[Steve]

Aye, we use vBulletin, with VBSEO middleware.

With respect to mods/hacks, we have a few, most are "off the shelf" from VB.org although they may be tweaked slightly. I think historically we've had more, but often the stuff we want ends up in the main vB package eventually anyway.

You can do a lot through hooks and templates these days, which is nice.

edit: I forgot to mention the main site. Any integration with the main site and our forums is very custom

[Cozwin]

i don't know if phpbb has changed but it used to be easy to hack and basically if you post your forum around a lot expect 100's of Russians to spam out so much you cant control it... i've seen it happen about 20 times now.

[Splash]

While that certainly used to be the case for PHPBB and there are still frequent security patches sol long as you keep your patches up to date and your webserver is set up securely it's not really any less secure than any of the other options. A forum I used to run on IPB and now on SMF used to have mass spam problems but the signup process is so much more secure we barely ever get spam now, despite massive increases in traffic.