Computers Windows Internet

Bitch board powered by smf. Automatic detection of the forum engine

Let "s not forget good old forum software. Geeks use them for tech support. Businesses use them for collaboration. Here" s our take on 70+ forum engines, hosts, and tools.

Forum Engines (Free Software)

Pocoo - Never heard of a Python-powered board? Neither did I, until I found Pocoo. It "s WSGI compatible, and has an advanced plugin system.

PunBB - With XHTML-compliant pages, simplicity, and speed, what "s not to like?

Quicksilver Forums (QSF) - Based on the now dead MercuryBoard, QSF has grown into a mature engine sporting features such as 3D permissions or skinning.

RForum - Strong forum with mailing list integration, powered by Ruby.


Simple Machines Forum (SMF) - Originally a fork of YaBB SE, SMF features WYSIWYG, powerful groups, and much more. Note: there is some dispute about whether SMF is free software or not, since you are not allowed to redistribute the forum / software itself without written permission.

Snitz - Basic ASP forum.

Tiny forum that stores its information in TXT files instead of a database.

Unclassified NewsBoard Forum (UNB) - Easy to use forum engine with Jabber notification.

UseBB - Lightweight, clear, and efficient board package.

Vanilla - Terrific AJAXified forum with a really nice look you won "t find anywhere else.

Vikingboard - Minimalistic board engine for high performance.

Viscacha - Board with integrated CMS and conversion from CuteCast, Vision Board, phpBB, and WBB.

YaBB - Easy to install and easy to use, YaBB is more than yet another bulletin board.

Yazd - Basic forum engine under the Apache license.

Forum Engines (Commercial)


AspNetForum - Clean and powerful ASP.NET forum engine. $ 85- $ 169.

Burning Board - Easy to set up board that will import existing Invision Power Board, MyBB, phpBB, PunBB, Simple Machines Forum, or vBulletin forums. $ 139.99- $ 269.99.

FuseTalk - Powerful forum software used by big-names such as Adobe, Boeing, NASA, NBC, US Airforce, McAfee and Lonely Planet. But the names will cost you. $ 649- $ 4599.

FusionBB - Calendar, photo gallery, PayPal, article templates, and much more are available with this great piece of software. $ 425 flat fee or $ 149 flat fee and $ 39 / year.

Ideal BB - ASP / COM board with a nice revision feature. $ 299- $ 2099.

Invision Power Board (IPB) - One of the most popular commercial boards of all time. $ 149.99- $ 299.99.

Jive Forums - Powerful board used by companies such as EA and ESPN. Unfortunately, very expensive. $ 14,950 flat fee, $ 1950/1000 users, $ 4950/5000 users, or $ 9950 / 20,000 users.

MyProBB - Powerful anti-spam features makes this one a keeper. It "s cheap, too. $ 25 / year.

UBB.threads - $ 725 flat fee or $ 229 flat fee and $ 125 / year.

vBulletin - Extremely popular board with tons of features. $ 160 flat fee or $ 85 / year.

WowBB - WYSIWYG, internationalization, and much more available with this PHP board. $ 99 flat fee or $ 55 / year.

Forum Hosts


Blursoft MetaForum - Has a ton of AJAX features, but manages to stay search friendly. And yes, the back button does work. Free.

Conforums - Unlimited categories, boards, and posts with HTML and JavaScript customization. Free.

CuteCast - Basic forum hosting. Free.

GoBoardz - Nice forum with photo sharing and a nice interface. Free.

Hyperboards - A big hosting provider with global login (one Hyperboards account logs you into every Hyperboards forum), skins, pages, and unlimited posts and boards. Free.

Invision Power Board (IPB) - One of the most popular commercial boards of all time. $ 10- $ 75 / month.

ProBoards - A well known host powered by YaBB. Free.

Sudden Launch - Forum host with unlimited posts, replies, and boards. Free.

WowBB - WYSIWYG, internationalization, and much more available with this PHP board. $ 99 flat fee and $ 3.95 / month or $ 7.95 / month.

Forum Integration


bbPress and Wordpress integration - Official howto on integrating the two sister projects.

Joomla component that adds a powerful forum.

Integrating Vanilla and Wordpress - Official guide to integrating the two popular CMSs.

IpbWiki - Connects Invision Power Boards and MediaWiki.

Joomla! Vanilla - Bridge between the Joomla CMS and Vanilla.

Forum Tools


BBCodeXtra Firefox Extension - Context menu to insert BBCode or (X) HTML. Freeware.

Tours and holidays in Australia

Internet forums are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication of visitors. A forum is a great way to organize a community on your site and build a consistent audience of visitors.

There are many forum engines out there. I have long wanted to review the forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is a topic for a separate article.

When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine the following points for yourself:

1. What functionality of the forum do you need. Most forum engines are very powerful, but some of the nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and getting familiar with detailed description functional.

2. Paid or free engine - this point must also be taken into account. In this review, there are only two paid engines - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. Community development - when the engine has a developed community both in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design templates. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many issues will have to be solved on their own.

4. Date last update engine - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers are not developing it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.

Okay, enough big words 🙂. I'll start with the most popular forum engines based on this CMS ranking.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I keep my forum Planet Photoshop on this engine. The reason is not only that it is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in the Russian Internet, so a lot of mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with which you can further expand the functionality.

Logs of actions of the user, moderator, administrator, precise settings of the access rights of the moderator and administrator, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and private messages - these are just a part of phpBB's functionality.

I also really like the direction in which phpBB is evolving from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both administrator and moderators and regular users.

My opinion for several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that is not demanding on hosting resources and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum.

Useful phpBB resources:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in runet. Many well-known forums work on it. Has developed communities in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet.

There are additional official applications for IPB (gallery, blog, file archive module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum, optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of actions of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of actions of search robots.

Useful Invision Power Board Sites:

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vBulletin is a great forum engine. It is paid, you can find out the cost. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.

Support for podcasting, automatic generation of forum RSS feed, the ability for visitors to create social groups and clubs of interest on the forum, user photo galleries, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by users themselves - these are the most interesting features of vBulletin, in my opinion.

punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is user-friendly and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is compensated by the speed of its work and undemanding hosting resources.

PunBB developers focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful punBB resources:

YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB does not use a database to store data, but files.

Comfortable text editor for writing messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates "on the fly", the ability to convert the page to a "printable version" - these are not all the features of the YaBB forum engine.

Now a little digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that give a good effect for increasing targeted traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed 10 profitable young sites from different topics as an example, how they are being promoted and described how it can be used to promote their resources.

SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity.

OpenID support, user warnings, the ability to premode topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that's not all that SMF allows!

Intellect Board is an original free engine. The idea of ​​the Intellect Board developers is the idea to create a website based on the forum. Intellect Board functionality is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, file archive, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. In fact, Intellect Board is a full-fledged content management system.

Main features of Intellect Board - Ability to set rules for all sections, support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating thumbnail copies of pictures and photos, the ability to issue warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (moreover, warnings can be both unlimited and limited in time), rating topics, articles, files and photos /

ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board)

ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It also, like YaBB, does not require a database and stores information in text files.

ExBB has the following advantages: pages are generated very quickly, the load on the server is minimal, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum works on files, no databases are required, for its work it is enough to have php support on the hosting.

Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS is that most of the modules are installed in one click

Pros of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (votes, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installation of add-ons (in most cases, uploaded, pressed one button - and that's it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to additions, of which about 450 have been written now.

Another interesting feature of the Vanilla forum engine is the "Whisper" system - you can simply whisper a message to someone without leaving the topic page, or create a "whisper" topic that will be a visual history of the correspondence.

Hello, Khabravchane!

Recently I was puzzled by the idea of ​​creating a forum. Now the creation of a forum does not give a lot of work for users, since there are a fairly large number of ready-made forum CMS that greatly facilitate the implementation of this task. It's just that among their abundance, it can be very difficult to choose the really necessary CMS. Therefore, I decided to write my own review, which, at least a little, but perhaps, will help the user to make a choice in the direction of one or another engine.

Free engines
#1 - PunBB
Nice and easy-to-use engine. Convenient and intuitive admin panel interface. The forum is very compact, has a small number of functions (from under the box), but this can be easily corrected with additions. Convenient and easy to create themes. If you want a forum that is simple and easy to set up, configure and use, this is the perfect choice.
- Russian-speaking community
There are many more different engines that I did not include in the review, because I think that they are not as popular and in demand as the ones mentioned above. Well, as for my subjective opinion, I would recommend PunBB or XenForo.

Tags: create forum, forum cms, forum engine

This article is not subject to comment, since its author is not yet a full member of the community. You will be able to contact the author only after he receives an invitation from someone from the community. Until then, its username will be hidden by an alias.

Let's start right away with the main script code:

#! / usr / bin / perl

# which-forum.pl script
# (c) 2010 Alexandr A Alexeev, http: // site /

use strict;

# commented out lines - for strictness
# if the task is to collect engine statistics, leave it as it is
# if you make a list of forums - uncomment

my $ data;
$ data. = $ _ while (<> ) ;

# check how much Powered by phpBB was without link in the footer
print "phpbb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? phpbb \ .com \ /? "[^>] *> phpBB / i or
# $ data = ~ /viewforum\.php\?"^""")*f=\d+/i or
$ data = ~ / phpBB \ -SEO / i or
$ data = ~ /) ;
print "ipb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? invision (?: board | power) \. com \ /? [^ "] *" [^>] *> [^<]*IP\.Board/i or
$ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? invisionboard \ .com \ /? "[^>] *> Invision Power Board / i or
$ data = ~ /

/ i or
$ data = ~ /index\.php\?†^""†*showforum=\d+/i) ;
print "vbulletin \ n "
if ($ data = ~ / Powered by:? [^<]+vBulletin[^<]+(?:Version)?/i or
$ data = ~ /) ;
print "smf \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? simplemachines \ .org \ /? "[^>] *> Powered by SMF / i or
$ data = ~ /index\.php\?"^))*board=\d+\.0/i) ;
print "punbb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (? :( ?: www \.)? punbb \ .org | punbb \ .informer \ .com) \ /? "[^>] *> PunBB / i); #or
# $ data = ~ /viewforum\.php\?†^"""*id=\d+/i);
print "fluxbb \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /viewtopic\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.) fluxbb \ .org \ /?" [^>] *> FluxBB / i) ;
print "exbb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? exbb \ .org \ /? "[^>] *> ExBB / i); # or
# $ data = ~ /forums\.php\?†^"""*forum=\d+/i);
print "yabb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? yabbforum \ .com \ /? "[^>] *> YaBB / i or
$ data = ~ /YaBB\.pl\?†^"""**num=\d+/i);
print "dleforum \ n "
if ($ data = ~ / \ (Powered By DLE Forum \)<\/title>/ i or
$ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] + (?: http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? dle \ -files \ .ru | act = copyright) [^ "] *"> DLE Forum<\/a>/ i) ;
print "ikonboard \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? ikonboard \ .com \ /? [^ "] *" [^>] *> Ikonboard / i or
$ data = ~ /\ n "
if ($ data = ~ /\ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /forums\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
# $ data = ~ /topic\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? flashbb \ .net \ /?" [^>] *> FlashBB / i) ;
print "stokesit \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /forum\.php\?f=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? stokesit \ .com \ .au \ /?" [^>] *> [^ \ /] * Stokes IT / i) ;
print "podium \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /topic\.php\?t=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = [""]? http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? sopebox \ .com \ /? [""]? [^>] *> Podium / i) ;
print "usebb \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /forum\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? usebb \ .net \ /?" [^>] *> UseBB / i) ;
print "wrforum \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /index\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? wr \ -script \ .ru \ /?" [^>] *> WR \ -Forum / i) ;
print "yetanotherforumnet \ n "
if ($ data = ~ / Yet Another Forum \ .net / i or
$ data = ~ /default\.aspx\?g=posts&t=\d+/i) ;

This and other scripts mentioned in the post can be found in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the code of the html page for the presence of forum engine signatures in it. We used a similar technique when defining WordPress and Joomla, but there are a couple of differences. First, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows you to load the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script, the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time the presence of the signature only gave weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the highest weight "won". I decided that in this case, this approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

To test how the script works, I did a little research. I made a list of several thousand forums and ran each of them through my script, thereby determining the percentage of program triggers and the popularity of various engines.

I used my google parser to get a list of forums. Search engine requests were sent like

site: forum. *. ru
site: talk. *. ru
site: board. *. ru
site: smf. *. ru
site: phpbb. *. ru
....

etc. The complete code of the query generator can be found in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl... In addition to zone.ru ,.su .ua .kz and.by were also used. It was difficult to do this research last time because WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in their URLs. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What are 600 Drupal Sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment upset me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, only 7083 were successfully identified with the engine, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I missed some engine? Was Bitrix really on half of the forums? Or should I spend more time looking for signatures? In general, more research is required here.

Among 56% of successfully identified engines, the most popular, as expected, were IPB (31%), phpBB (26.6%) and vBulletin (26.5%)

They are closely followed by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I would not recommend strongly trusting these figures (they say, every third forum in RuNet works on IPB), but certain conclusions can, of course, be drawn.

For example, if you intend to create a website on a forum engine and plan to modify the forum, say, pay users $ 0.01 for each message with automatic withdrawal of funds once a week, then you should choose one of the three most popular engines. The more popular a forum is, the more likely it is to find a programmer who is well versed in it.

If no significant changes in the engine are foreseen, then it may make sense to choose not the most popular engine, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of automatically sent spam on it.

Scripts for finding / defining forums can also be found in more than one practical application. The first thing that came to my mind personally was to sort the identified forums by TCI and place on the first hundred posts with links to one of their sites. However, a hundred forum dofolllow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are interested in transitions.

It is clear that the named use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them.