I'm somewhat of a phpBB expert, I've installed and modified countless numbers of forums for people. Do not even bother with those other forums, aside from VBulletin, it is the best forum out there. YaBB, Phorum, and others cannot even compare to the power of phpBB. If you need any help with it, email me, or contact me on the support team of: http://www.phpbbhacks.com/

I can help you out with any problems you may encounter.

Well don't forget invisionboard. It was fairly easy to install and I had a few problems installing it but that was because of my stupidity. Oddly enough my zip program got rid of all the folders.:ahh: www.invisionboard.com

there's also Ikonboard.

Upgraded my XMB 1.6 to 1.8 today. Went pretty smoothly actually. Then I tried to install a calendar and I almost lost everything. Luckily, I had backed up the database before that happened (thanks Brandon;)) and all is well now.

Anyway, you all can check it out at www.team696.org/forum/index.php

Don't register if you're never going to come back, but if you all could just browse around and make sure nothing is goofed up that would be great. Let me know if you see something wrong.

Thanks,
sanddrag

I'm a fan of phpBB2. Team 245 uses it on its forum. Very sleek/fast forum software.

We scrapped our old Ikonboard 3, because it was slow and I like PHP better than Perl. The admin panel in Ikonboard 3 is insanely powerful though...Thats one thing I miss. Ah well..

Ya. I know that's one thing they will be working on for phpBB 3

Yes, I must admit I really don't like the panel for phpBB.

I know that there are many things that the defalut version on phpBB misses. BUT... I was looking at next version 2.1 (or 2.2 ??) and it will be A LOT better. Many of the things that phpBB misses that for example vB has, phpBB will have in it's next version. Hopefully, the next major version of phpBB should be out sometime in the late first quarter of 2003. :)

PS: When you say that the admin panal in phpBB isn't good, what is it missing? - The only thing i can think of is how you have to look up members. (But... you can install a mod that takes you to the admin panal whenever you click on a link in the member profile)

PPS: If you every want to see what vB admin panal looks like / have a test forum go to: http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo/ (But... it's only version 2)

PPPS: I know i said that phpBB is going to be a lot like vB now, but... vB three with all it's 'extra' options will surpass what phpBB will be. :(

I wrote my own from the ground up. Mostly for fun. :)

I need to be able to install it on my Mac OS 9 Server

If you are willing to pay then i would recomend Vbulletin.
Otherwise i would say OpenBB http://prolixmedia.com

Custom made forum :) The best way to go.

Chris

Why reinvent the wheel?

I personally prefer Invision Boards. For some reason it just feels... snappier.

But when you get down to it, most forums are equal...

Hell yes.

Invision board is awesome. Matt, you're running your own server, right? So you'll need to configure apache to allow PHP (go to the httpd.conf file--it's probably in /etc/httpd--and delete the #'s in front of the php modules in the Load_Module and Add_Module sets) and install mysql, which you can do fairly easily these days. Invision board is great. Tons of skins and hacks. I've got a coupla them running. The only problem is you can't configure it from your server or anything on your LAN, but I'm fairly sure no messageboard can do that, because just about all of them are built for people who FTP them up.

Like I said, I have a coupla messageboards hosted on the server I just set up. They're not exactly developed, but they give you everything an expensive version of vBulletin gives you in a much-easier-to-configure form and for FREE.

EDIT:
MattK, what the hell are you running on an OS9 server? Chuck Shotton's MacHTTP?

--Petey

I've always wondered why people buy vBulletin.

It was understandable when there were no good free options around... but that isn't a valid excuse anymore.