Have you ever used phpbb?

Mmmh, in a similar vein to something I said concerning BBS a few days ago, I feel that this blog is already fine as it is, and does not need the forum that much.

Really the only thing thats missing here is the ability to post your own threads. I don’t know blogging stuff that well, but isn’t it possible to have a sort of sub-blog to this one, where all registered users are automatically ‘Guest bastards’ like your close friends are on your main blog? With the same blogging package?

Ingolfson

Etherian, I’ve used phpBB before in the past, but until just recently it seemed to be a dead project. Now that the developers have said they’re going to work on it again I’ll take another look at it.

Ingolfson, with EE what you propose is a possibility and I’ve given that some thought as well. I can think of a couple of possible ways I could set things up to emulate a BBS using the standard features of EE and I may just go that route if my experiments bear fruit.

I have found phpBB to be a good product and fairly easy to use.  It’s also free.

FWIW I moved from invision to phpBB a few months ago and the import utility was virtually flawless.  All posts were ported across.  I only had to manually edit the path to avatars in the database.

I enjoy reading your blog every day, but I never look at your forum. 

However, I do run Invision 1.3 for my forums and they just had a deal that for $40 you can get a one year license.  You may still continue to use the product after that year, but you will not receive updates or support. 

I thought that was a pretty good deal, so I purchased a one year license and will be upgrading my forums in the coming days.

Les, I use phpBB on my site as well, and am very happy with it.

However, I long for the day when I can completely toss it when the EE forum module comes out!  It’s quite frustrating for me to explain to my users that they need to set up two separate accounts…

The first question is whether the original unsupported license has an expiration feature of sorts. If not, there’s the possibility of grandfathering.

According to the IPS forums, the free but unsupported licenses are indeed gone; in return they cut the prices of their commercial offerings.

In my opinion, the forums are neither fish nor fowl. The only use they see these days is by a few posters only, probably because that’s where they can start new threads. By and large, I’d rather see some kind of facility to start threads on the main site; perhaps controlled by a moderation. Your call…

There are a couple of forum packages out there, of which phpBB2 is probably the most widely known and used. You could also run e107 and make the built-in forums the startup page.

Or - and here’s a shameless plug - run drupal in a configuration I use on my site. All members can start forum threads, which get bumped up to the frontpage. I like the idea, but drupal has a couple of annoying bugs and limitations if run that way.

I don’t use the forums here, but I’d have to agree that phpBB is a great one.  I run several forums of my own, and they all use phpBB.  In all honesty, I never even thought to check to see if it was being actively developed (though I normally do) because it’s done everything I want it to, and extremely well.

If the import utility works that well, then there’s no harm in doing some tinkering, right?

Erm....we have forums here?