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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?

Posted by samzenpus on from the let-my-people-post dept.

First time accepted submitter DustyMurray writes "I am considering adding forums to my website, and am just getting confused by all the options. My first reaction is always DIY. You get better website integration, and it looks and feels 100% how you want it to look and feel. However looking at things like phpBB and Vanilla forums, I will be hard pressed to build a better user experience in a reasonable amount of time. Also these out-of-the-box solutions seem to be shouting 'Easy to integrate with your website.' So, considering this, how easy are these ready build forums really to integrate? I want to be able to insert stuff on certain pages, so it's not either the forums, or my site... It must be a mix. I do not want a second login system on my site. And last but not least, I definitely don't want to have this typical generic look that most forums sport. Can all that be delivered with the out-of-the-box forums that exist today? Which one is the most flexible regarding these wishes?"

11 of 259 comments (clear)

  1. vBulletin by DevTecha · · Score: 5, Informative

    I would say that vBulletin is your best choice. It has a huge amount of features you're going to love.

    Seriously, building something like vBulletin would take you years with all the front-end and admin panel features. It is also customizable to every site so that it can look the same as your site (but maintains the usability users have adjusted to on other sites). This is also performance thing apart from features - you most likely lack the knowledge to make high performance forum as good as vBulletin guys have.

    I've seen large sites that have connected their website with vBulletin, so it is possible. Not only that, but vBulletin actually has vBulletin Connect that lets you build your website around vBulletin. Some CMS (Content Management Systems) also support vBulletin directly.

    One specific large site I use daily did convert from their proprietary system they had used for more than 10 years. vBulletin was their choice, and while it did take a few months to convert that old system, the forum now works much better and supports way more features that users like. If you are making a new site you can obviously do it correctly the first time and skip the conversion.
    If you are doing this as work for a professional site, I would stay away from phpBB and other free solutions. While it's possible to use them, you don't get any support and they're hard to integrate exactly the way you want to. They also tend to lack on the features that something like vBulletin has.

    vBulletin really is your best choice. It's a little pricy, but for what you get the price is more than justified.

    1. Re:vBulletin by JMJimmy · · Score: 5, Informative

      As a user I would say don't use vBulletin. Sure it has some great features, but I hate using it.

      phpBB has everything you need, a very active "addons" community, and is much nicer for users. Added benefit, it's free - takes about 10 minutes to get installed, and has enough features and options to keep you busy customizing/configuring for a while.

    2. Re:vBulletin by Cheech+Wizard · · Score: 5, Informative

      I would suggest that you really think about vBulletin and read about the history. It was great when Jelsoft owned it, but it was bought out by Internet Brands and is now a mess. The last "good" version was 3.8.7. Version 4 was a disaster. Version 5 is being sold and is in beta but it really sucks. vBulletin is no longer a "best choice". It was some years ago but these days it isn't. I've been running vBulletin forums since 2001 but stopped "upgrading" at 3.8.7. To make it worse, the Internet Brands people have terrible technical support and - Well, vBulletin used to be the "gold standard". Today, not by a long shot.

    3. Re:vBulletin by Khyber · · Score: 4, Interesting

      My bulletin board/forum is spam-bot secure. Why? Video captcha of animated .GIFs. No spam bot can get through, you *NEED* a human to answer the captcha, as it's a question related to the GIF itself (example, display a short clip of Hajime no Ippo, where Ippo is performing the Dempsey Roll. The question will ask "What move is being performed here?")

      Have fun making a bot with knowledge of every manga/anime ever made with enough horsepower to OCR everything.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:vBulletin by somersault · · Score: 4, Informative

      Uhm.. well I'm guessing it must be a forum about manga/anime, but as someone with more than a passing interest in anime, I still have no idea wtf you're talking about. And after Googling it, it doesn't look like one that I'd watch since I'm not that interested in boxing.. so yeah. Maybe you should choose something that any human could answer, rather than get so specific? Very few people are interested in every single manga/anime out there, considering that a lot of them have very different target audiences.

      --
      which is totally what she said
    5. Re:vBulletin by Randle_Revar · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Glad I never tried to sign up there. I am no idiot, and I like anime, but even if I *could* figure such a thing out, I can't imagine I would take the time and effort to do so. I might run a few google searches, but I have doubts that that would be enough to find it.

      --
      Climate Progress - Hell and High Water
    6. Re:vBulletin by Thesis · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As a long time owner of a vB license, I second the motion to read about the history of vBulletin before making a decision to use their software. When IB bought Jelsoft, it went downhill rather quickly. Many would say, and I have to agree, that vB jumped the shark after the acquisition. Many of us who own and operate boards also agree that version 3.8.7 was the last good version. The management at Jelsoft/IB attempted to morph the software into a catchall social networking solution akin to Facebook, in my eyes anyway. Many of us who have or had "owned" licenses feel that we got screwed, for the terms in licensing changed dramatically beginning with version 4. It turned into a huge money grab in the eyes of many, including myself. Many customers went with other options, and some of us never updated beyond 3.8.7, and are looking for other solutions. Yes, I have tried versions 4 and 5, and they are horrid IMHO.

      It should also be mentioned that some key vB developers left the company as well, for they agreed with many of the customers at that time, that Jelsoft had lost its way. Those developers who left, started to build their own forum software solution from scratch, which is called XenForo ( http://xenforo.com/ ), and is offered to the public as a paid option to forum software. IB got quite pissy over this, and filed multiple court cases against them, which has thus far proved to be fruitless, and appears to be simply a way to make XenFro bleed financially through litigation. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/a-statement-regarding-the-current-litigation.7567/

      I will say that I personally do not think that XenFro is quite yet up to snuff, when compared to older versions of vB, or other paid solutions. I do hold hope that one day soon it will be.

  2. Drupal by cultiv8 · · Score: 4, Informative

    Drupal core forum combined with the advanced forum will meet your requirements. We used this approach for IFC, see it here.

    --
    sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
  3. Take all the recommendations you get here ... by tlambert · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Take all the recommendations you get here ...and then:

    (1) Get the number of CERT advisories for each of them
    (2) Get the percentage market share of each one of them
    (3) Calculate (#2 * 100) / #1
    (4) Whoever is left with the largest number, pick that one

    For example, the calculation above for bbPress, which is a WordPress plugin, would also need to take into account the number of WordPress only CERT advisories, plus those for any plugins besides bbPress you felt it necessary to use, and the resulting number would let you write off using bbPress. Likewise, anything that used Java as an implementation detail would probably get written off due to the number of security holes which have been found in Java. Anything with an SQL back end would have to take into account SQL injections for the other components you intended to use, and so forth.

    Ideally, you would probably put your forums on an isolated machine, rather than hosting everything on one machine, which would drastically reduce the attack surface -- and this would become pretty crystal clear to you after you performed the calculation exercise.

  4. The Forum Matrix by thenendo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I recently had to select a forums solution for my company, and this site proved extremely useful: http://www.forummatrix.org/

    It catalogues tons of closed and open-source forum products coded by dozens of variables, and lets you compare them in a big matrix. Very useful if you have constraints/preferences like "works with SQL server" or "isn't PHP", etc.

    My main complaint about it is that some of the data are out-of-date, but it is still a great starting point.

  5. Disqus by bucktug · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://disqus.com/

    Customize it with CSS... call it a day. Forums are just pages with styled links. Your server doesn't suffer the load... the federated login is handled by others...

    --
    I had a flame... but she had a fire.