Creating a forum like WickedFire - what does it take?

[Andrew]

You sound very confident about that.

I have a hard time seeing why so many thousands of people use phpBB for their large sites if it so vunerable. I think some of these bigger sites that are making money and have been around for years would have made the switch if this was the case.

Now im curious and am going to have to do some research.

I think sometemple makes a good point.

The people who run phpBB without having problems do so because they are updating it constantly and run regular backups.

There is a non-webmaster board I am a member of, I won't name it, but its of modest size. The admins just spent a whole day rolling over to another app because they were sick of getting hacked.

Modified enough, e.g. the biggest board online Gaia Online, phpBB might be fine. Sorry, I can't program and I don't have the time to do all the crazy shit myself.

Look, if you live in Estonia or something and $150 is a big deal, absolutely use phpBB. If you have a business plan that involves pumping out 20 different forums, then yeah vB might not make sense.

But.. if you have a ready traffic stream and/or are serious about running a board just buy vB.

I have run 3 forums. The 2 phpBB were tiny and have both been hacked. The first one I never backed up and had to start from scratch (yes, my fault.) The vB forum has over 5,000 users and I haven't had a single problem.

I have used both extensively. Security issue aside I would much rather use vB. I can easily customize things within the control panel that require extensive source file modification with phpBB. 9 times out of 10 when I want the board to do something special I can just go over to vBulletin.org and the modification has already been made. Open up the plug-ins in the contrl panel, bam.

Except for a set of extreme circumstances there is no competition between vB and phpBB. As a user, from the outside, may be not. But when you are the admin and owner there is a very big difference.

 

[Juicify]

It's correct phpBB is hacked quite alot but there are also many other open source forums out there. Simple Machines, PunBB etc.

 

[Squirrelinabox]

I'm curious if the new version of phpBB (version 3 I believe) will alleviate most of the security problems. It's still in beta I think, but supposedly it bridges the gap a lot between phpbb and vBulletin.

 

[Penguin]

Not only is phpBB easily hacked but it's just entirely lame from an admin's perspective. You literally have jack shit for options in comparison. Hell I don't even use my forum for money, I use my forum to generate traffic to my site that does make money. $150 is nothing for such a powerful script, I'm amazed it's so cheap. If you start the right forum and have the right tools you can make back the money in the first month easy. It's entirely worth it, no question in my mind.