Favorite Forum Softwear
 

What is you favorite type of forum softwear and why?
I would have to say that mine is V Bulletin because it is the most powerfull and one of hte best looking and best running is you are looking to run a big forum.
Just incase some forum softwear inculde.
phpbb
IPB
SMF
V Bulletin

Proboards. PB is small (compared to giants like vB) so a lot of people know each other and become close. It's like an extended community.

IPB is my favorite because Its pretty much all I am familiar with.

If you are talking about paid forum softwares I will prefer vBulletin over Invision Power Board etc because vBulletin is really cheap as compared to other board softwares like Invision Power board when you compare their offered features. So I will vote for vbulletin in Paid forum softwares competition.

In free ones I will prefer Simple Machines Forum. PhpBB comes second in my free forum softwares rankings list.

Ditto John...

vBulletin is an excellent forum software, Great support...great features...way better then IPB.

In free ones I would prefer SMF (Though haven't used it much) and then PhpBb :)

It depends on what I am doing. Recently, I needed a portal. vBulletin is nice, but expensive. Also, since it is a paid script, you can release junk for it for money. Things like SMF, phpBB, and MyBB are all under the GPL license, the licenses that says any product made that uses the forum must also be released under the same license (which says it must be released free). A lot of the vBulletin plugins, mods, and hacks that are paid for have a similiar thing for phpBB that's free.

Portal wise, there are a lot of choices for phpBB portals, but not a lot of free ones for vBulletin. After buying the license, I didn't want to buy some other junk. I have a few favorites though.

I like phpBB because of the wide popularity. It's easy to find plugins and mods, and especially themes. It has a few portals that range from basic to fairly complex.

I like MyBB because the portal is already included. It has a lot of features. There are some themes and mods available, but it's fairly new. One of the things that's holding them back is the fact they aren't included in Fantastico. A lot of people cannot install scripts and rely on that. MyBB is tied with phpBB for being my favorite free script.

PunBB has a portal that wasn't originally released in English. It is very basic, but I liked it. It wasn't really connected with the forum, which I thought was stupid, but I found out it gave you greater control because it wasn't limited to what the forum would do. There are some parts of the portal that weren't fully translated and you get some French words popping up in a few places.

I tried E107 which has a forum and everything included and I thought it was decent. It has a lot of themes available, but it is really cluttered. You have to do some heavy modifications to get it down to something managable. Plus, it's bit of an overkill for just a forum and portal. There was a lot of other sections I didn't want.

SMF was fairly good, too, but I found it to be a little ugly. There are a few themes available, but it's one of those forums tha you must replace the default with one, a good one, or else I would hate it. I don't really like way the login info is shown at the top, but that doesn't really matter. It's a nice forum, has a portal, and has support, but I would choose phpBB or MyBB first.

SMF integrates nicely with a lot of blogging scripts, but I still think that phpBB is nicer to use, or, if you want out of the box power, vB.

IPB is awesome. Vbulletin isn't too bad, if you're going for a free forum, PHPBB has a great backing community.
Demo : free forums

I would have to say vBulletin for my favourite forum softwear. I used phpBB also a bit, but vBulletin is my definite favourite!

I love the flexibility of SMF forums - but haven't really set up my own 100% so far. I still can't decide which to go for ? :(