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.
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