Forum software?

[fosin]

I need some forum software for our intranet to keep up with projects in my group. I would like the layout to be similar to vBulletin, but just need basic features. Would like a free or cheaper one than vBulletin and will be running it on Win2k. What would you recommend?

[SoopaStar]

http://www.yabbforum.com/
you will need it configured with a mail server since you won't have access to sendmail. I used it on a win2k PC running apache for win32.

Paul

[GohanSSJ]

I would go for phpBB2, you can find it at www.phpbb.com

[Cabinetmaker]

Invision Power Board (http://www.invisionboard.com/download.cgi) is by far the best free prog out.

[SoopaStar]

invision isn't exactly free...

[Mntsnow]

Fosin, What type of coding do you want? ASP, Perl, PHP ect. Also what type of databases will be avaliable... Access, MS SQL, MySQL ect.

There is a bunch of freebie's out there that do a good job or you can spend a little bit of money to alot of money and get one that is more feature rich and has official support structure ect.

Let us know a bit more what your invisioning and we can provide you with a more directed answer

[fosin]

Well, I was looking for something easy. It will only be used by about 15 people, with about 20 posts a day. ASP or PHP would be ok (compiled would be best I guess).

The project management software I've been looking at mostly runs standalone and is a simple install. All you need is a web server and some don't even require IIS to be installed or a DSN (just for running on an intranet). But a forum will do what I want better than the software I've seen and it will be easier for people to use. In the past I just used the forum that worked with frontpage, but it's as bare bones as you can get and hard to admin.

The only two (small) servers I have access to are over taxed as it is so I won't have admin privilages on whatever server it's installed on. So...it needs to be somewhat easy to install. I assume IT won't mind installing php.

[fosin]

I've got a copy of this one and setup is simple
http://www.cgiexpert.com/scripts/userforum.exe

But, as you can see it's pretty weak.

[Mntsnow]

ASP and an access database is very simple.. Check out

"Snitz" It's what I first ran when I started out a forum based website and ran very well. I have still avaliable on the net the old site so you can check it out but the newer version has alot more features and it's free :)

http://65.100.204.164/forums/default.asp and get Snitz from http://forum.snitz.com/

[fosin]

Snitz should do it :D

I just remembered our IT manager is pretty good with asp so an asp forum should be easy to get going. I like the other ones posted better, but would take a lot more work to get set up if I could IT to set it up it in the first place. phpBB has some killer styles :).

Thanks for the help guys.

[fosin]

Wow, don't think that could have been much easier to setup.

I used the default access DB. I read that access couldn't handle too much abuse. What DB did you use on yours? Would MySql be a better choice?

[Mntsnow]

I used Access and it handled the load just fine. With the amount of users you mentioned I wont think you will have a bit of trouble :)

[Cruez]

I used yabb on mine, and it went pretty smooth..

For some reason it seems to load a little slow though...??

http://www.cruez.com/cgi-bin/yabb/YaBB.cgi

I'm assuming because its a cgi type forum...

[SoopaStar]

cruez-
what version of yabb are you using? 1.3 was released recently and it addressed some speed issues. 1.1 had many bugs fixed with 1.2 and 1.3. I am also using 1.1 becuase I don't know if the DB or user info will xfer over to 1.3

Paul

[Mntsnow]

CGI/Perl based code can be extremely fast if and when the hardware is up to par and not bogged down/overworked when in a shared webserver enviroment too.

[Cruez]

Yup, Its 1.1

Maybe its time for an upgrade...

I haven't had much time to do anything with my site in a while...

I don't have a lot of posts in there so maybe I should upgrade it... wont have to worry so much if I loose info..