Best Free Website Forum Software

Forum applications are server programs that create discussion-based websites. Many are free or open-source PHP codebase applications that use a MySQL database. They are small but complex webapps that generally come in at under 4MB for the zipped installer file. A 'forum' is the word we commonly use, though bulletin board was more popular at one time; and a forum now is usually a container for several different 'boards', which are the actual main-topic start pages.

Forums, like most PHP - MySQL server applications, are easy to install remotely via FTP and browser. They can be managed by browser, and can usually be expanded and upgraded by the use of plugins. There are many similarities with other server-based website programs, such as the way they are browser-managed, the backend admin, the template-based layout, and the extension process.

Most server software like this is designed to run on a LAMP server. A forum application can be installed in three different ways: as a standalone application, sometimes sharing webspace with another website application such as a blog or CMS; as a bridged application, connected into a CMS and sharing the same database, but not actually being part of the other application; or as a CMS plugin, an integral part of a CMS.

The criteria we could use to judge forums might include appearance and style; visitor usability; admin usability; features and functions; ACL; SEO; robustness and reliability; and several other areas, since this type of server application generates a complex dynamic website featuring extended visitor interaction.

Because forums are similar in outline form and technical operation to other website main applications such as blog and CMS software (most use a text-based code and a MySQL database), it is easy to compare them. Unfortunately forums do not come out well from this comparison as many CMS and blog applications are light years ahead in on-page assets, SEO, and even owner usability. Forum software has a long way to go to catch up.

SMF
SMF is my top tip in freeware forums. That doesn't mean it's problem-free, but it does its job, all round, better than any other I've tried.

The Simple Machines Forum is the benchmark for these programs because it is widely known and appreciated; it is one of the most frequently installed; and most forum users will be familiar with it. It's easy to install remotely via FTP and browser. The usual MySQL database parameters need to be input - username, password etc - and installation is smooth and quick.

Documentation is not a strong point, in common with most open-source projects of course. However, there are so few potential problems with SMF that this isn't really a big negative. If in doubt, use the support forum :-)

Templates of some kind are the basis for the page layout in all dynamic web applications; in this project they are called Themes. Three default ones are supplied as standard, and you can get up and running with one of these easily.

Unless you go the commercial route though, you'll find that SMF templates, in common with all other default and free forum templates I've seen, are severely deficient in modern web requirements, when compared to other applications like blogs and CMS. As regards on-page assets, the situation is not just sparse - it's non-existent. The very least that any user would require now are additional optional menu positions; and of course other module positions for Adsense / PPC, banner positions, news, announcements, top pages, new content and so forth. A module is the usual word for a block of content displayed separately from the main page subject, and can include anything from an image fader to a news ticker. Forums as a whole don't comply here for some unfathomable reason, and SMF is no different.

That situation is all the more strange because the plugin system as a whole, and the installation procedure in particular, is so very good in SMF. There is nothing any webapp developer could teach the SMF people about plugins - the entire system here is excellent. There is even a pre-install test run that tells you if a new plugin is likely to cause problems, and what those might be. The SMF plugin system scores 9 out of 10 - and we haven't given that mark to anyone else anywhere. Currently there are around 500 plugins available; not a vast number, but enough to enable some additional tasks (it takes around 2,000 before an application is notably well-supported in this area).

SEO (aka search engine optimizing) is the process of increasing website earnings by increasing traffic and improving the website. It is of course the cornerstone of web success now as without the search engines, you won't get any traffic. The SEO situation here is not brilliant, however. The core application is poor in this respect, and it's not much better with plugins installed. In any case there are only about 5 or 6 SEO-related plugins. This situation is common to all free forum programs so it's a universal problem. The authors don't seem to have caught on to the fact that it doesn't matter how good your website is, if there are no visitors it's not much use. Visitor traffic depends on success in the search engines; search success depends on SEO. And good SEO in a website application - assuming you chose one with good code - starts with short, flat, relevant URLs and unique per-page metadata.

In both these areas SMF is limited, though the URLs are at least acceptable when the correct plugin is used. The metadata is a different story. You can only have boilerplate meta and that's that. Unique per-page metadata is a cornerstone of search success, so the authors either don't know this or discount website traffic as unimportant. Session IDs are unfortunately used occasionally, when the application identifies a user-agent wrongly, and this is a huge negative for SEO. If you want search success, you have to lose the SIDs.

The admin usability rating is OK for SMF. It is limited by the use of the commonly-seen text-based (as against panel-based) backend management apparatus. This method is a limiting factor, and the admin system needs to be more streamlined and task-oriented.

There is only one glitch in the install and admin procedures worth mentioning; the common situation which all forums seem to suffer from, that there is no working board after installation. Trying to set up the first board, on a new forum program, by a new forum owner, will be the most difficult task faced in connection with forums. This seems common to all forums, and of course should be fixed. Usability is a dirty word unfortunately, so an issue like this isn't really a surprise.

ACL - Access Control Levels (or Lists) - refers to who can do what and where. This aspect is good on SMF, and is all that the vast majority of owners will need. Granular ACL (fully detailed control) always makes an application very much harder to use, and thankfully they have stopped short of going down that road.

Visitors are well served on SMF. It's an attractive, logical and easily-used forum. Templates of course have a big role here, and there is a very large range to choose from. There is a complete lack, however, of any of the multiple page assets that users of every other kind of website software would consider essential. It makes for a clean but very basic and limited page view. We couldn't find any menu or module plugins in early '08, but they may be there now.

Usability is fine for experienced forum visitors, but not so good for newbies. This is of course a universal problem in any case. As an example, if you take an office worker who uses a PC and the Internet everyday in their work (and is therefore hardly a complete noob), but has never used a forum before; then ask them to post their first message - you will find they can't. They don't realise that you first need to register and login before the buttons to post a message are visible. This is something I see in usability testing all the time: software is written and maintained by experienced people, and they just cannot see the problems new users have. Very easy indeed to fix of course - simply  have a large menu link to a new user's help page. Only trouble is, forums are still a hundred years out of date and don't have additional menus you can add to the page...

In conclusion, the negatives are common to all forums, in my experience. All in all, though, this is a very smooth forum solution that deserves its tag as the benchmark in freeware forums. It looks simple, but does many complex things so smoothly it is deceptive. The good points are SMF's mature status and smoothness; its superb plugin system; the vast range of templates; its easy LAMP install; the attractive page layout; the good ACL; and the good visitor experience.

The bad points are the Stone Age SEO; the complete lack of any on-page assets; the tricky first board set-up; the occasional session IDs; and the all-too-common lack of proper documentation.

SMF is the top tip in freeware forums because it's an all-round good choice. There are other forums that do one or two jobs better, but this great all-rounder does the trick.

FireBoard for Joomla
Fireboard is an example of a CMS plugin forum. We include it because it is a genuine contender for the best free forum choice, even though it cannot exist outside of Joomla CMS. It would be entirely feasible to install the CMS just for this purpose, and not generate any other content pages. In this way, the forum would be the only content; and since the advantages over other forums in the areas of on-page assets, SEO, owner usability and a dozen other areas would be substantial, this is not such a strange idea. In any case, with the CMS potential, it is unlikely that the forum would remain as the sole website content for long. One thing forum owners desperately need is a way to include something - anything - that is additional to the barebones forum display; and Fireboard in Joomla might just be the answer to a prayer for them.

Installing it is simple and quick, since it is a plugin. The main application has already taken care of the database configuration and so on.

I have never found any documentation in any form. Luckily, it isn't really necessary apart from at one stage near the end of the installation.

Because Fireboard is part of Joomla, templates are a strong point - any Joomla one can be used; and that means the widest choice on the planet. You can even have a different template on each page, which points out the capability.

On the SEO question there is only one answer: the finest SEO of any forum solution by a long mile. There are many reasons for this, but it devolves to being a part of a CMS that - when properly managed of course - is superb in this area. It only falls down on full W3CAG support, but since only 0.1% of users are likely to know what that means, it's hardly an issue.

Admin usability isn't bad. It is similar in most ways to other forums with a text-based admin backend, and very familiar in all respects. There are even some useful configurations here that are missing from standalone forums.

There is only one big negative: the usual 'missing board' problem that afflicts all forums. In a perfect world, or even a sensible one, there would be a working Board (ie forum) after installation; and you would simply modify the parameters to suit your usage profile. Then, you could perhaps clone that, to create the next board. And the next.

Here, though, we have the perennial problem of no 'forums' in existence after the installation. Of course, you can load sample data - which naturally includes a working board - but that puts in tons and tons of useless junk that is always hard to remove. All we need is one, simple, working board. And with Fireboard, we have the hardest forum of all (barring phpBB3 perhaps) to actually get a board up and running in. Experienced forum admins will know the score here - you have to create a 'forum' first to act as a container for the 'boards' - but new admins will be flummoxed. This isn't helped by the total lack of documentation.

ACL in Fireboard is basic but sufficiently capable. All the usual functions are available.

The visitor experience is good, and improved of course due to the availability of all the CMS on-page assets. In this respect Fireboard kicks all other forums into touch.

The conclusion is that Fireboard for Joomla is a remarkably good solution. At first, the idea of installing a CMS just to have a forum is a bit crazy, I guess. But when you look at all the individual issues, the initial worry fades away. You're left with a forum that has superb SEO and on-page assets such as menus and modules (content block displays), a choice of around 3,000 templates, a choice of additional content pages if you need them, and a dozen other pluses.

The negatives? Well, it may not be the best choice if you have very heavy traffic, as a forum loads a server up more than just about anything else. But this can be solved by load-balancing of course, and in theory, if you have good traffic, you have a good income, so multiple servers are possible. Although if the forum is the main site content anyway, this won't be an issue.

There is a possible security negative, in that sites that are attacked heavily will find an advantage in keeping the various website sections separate. Then a problem with any one part will be contained and firewalled: limited to just the database it was on. Forums are inherently more vulnerable to attack because they allow users to register, to write to the DB, to possibly include some code, and so forth. With the current webspam battles added to this, forums are a massive target for bots, so you cannot argue against security policy in keeping them separate. To be completely honest, this has always swayed my decison in the past, and where I thought it safer I installed the forum separately.

The missing board after installation is really annoying, as ever; and the CSS could do with a touch up here and there - Fireboard has a slightly compact feel about it, as if designed for a narrow page - but that is easily done.

In the case of a blog, I would never use a plugin solution, only WordPress or an alternative; there are a bunch of reasons why this is a better solution. But in this case, a plugin forum doesn't seem to have much in the way of negatives at all. It only gets second place to SMF because it would be too far out to suggest it for the #1 spot...
 

phpBB3
The phpBB series is a very popular forum solution, perhaps even more so than SMF. The phpBB2 version has a big following and is well-supported. The new version, the 3.0 series, has the best ACL in forums, which is fully granular; but this results in major admin usability issues. This new version of the software is not fully supported by the community yet, so as at March '08, it is not a good choice; there are few templates or 'plugins'. For example the template page at the central site was completely empty when I looked, compared to hundreds for the phpBB2 series and more being added all the time. In fact it looks as if the community effort is still centred around phpBB2.

The phpBB3 forum is unusual - perhaps unique - among modern website applications in that it does not have a plugin system. Changes are made by hacking the core files using 'Mods', which are snippets of code that must be pasted in piecemeal. This is a step back to the 90's and is hard to understand.

SEO is poor, and there is a lot to be done before phpBB3 is up to even SMF levels here. Admin usability is also notably poor, due mainly to the way all configurations seem to derive from complex ACL settings. Admittedly, ACL in phpBB3 is the best in free forums: it's fully granular and provides the most detailed of control - at a price. Visitor usability however is good, and on a par with other forums.

Verdict: I had hoped this forum would present a strong challenge to SMF, so that there would be some sort of choice. It showed every sign of being a credible challenger, from the outside at any rate. It turned out, though, that phpBB3 had so many negatives there was no way it could present any sort of challenge.

The installation routine aside (very slick and professional indeed), this forum just doesn't cut it. The phpBB3 forum software is a strange mix of capable sections combined with very poor ones. Unfortunately the negatives far outweigh the positive factors and I can't recommend it.

A full-length version of this review can be found elsewhere on the site at: Forum Software Reviews

Website forum software specifications:

SMF - Simple Machines Forum
website: www.simplemachines.org
download: http://download.simplemachines.org
author: SMF project
version reviewed: SMF v1.1.4
zip installer size: 2.13MB
license: free, customised open-source version
type: PHP - MySQL
server type: LAMP; servers with PHP and MySQL
choice of templates: 100's
number of plugins (estimate): 500
SEF URL solution tested: PrettyURLs

Fireboard for Joomla
website: www.bestofjoomla.com
download: http://www.bestofjoomla.com/content/blogsection/3/9/
author: Best.of.Joomla team
version reviewed: Fireboard 1.0.4
zip installer size: 0.8MB
license: free
type: plugin for CMS; PHP - MySQL
additional software required: Joomla CMS - www.joomla.org
 

phpBB3
website: www.phpbb.com
download link: http://www.phpbb.com/downloads/
author: phpBB project
version reviewed: phpBB3
zip installer size: 2.14MB
license: free, GNU
type: PHP - MySQL
servers supported: LAMP; servers with PHP and MySQL
choice of templates: few
number of plugins (estimate): none 
     ('mods' consist of raw code hacks, there is no plugin system)

This software category is maintained by volunteer editor Chris Price.
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