phpBB or vBulletin

I'm thinking about doing away with my phpBB and changing to vBulletin. Have any of you used vBulletin? Anyone have any pros or cons on either side. The only thing that sucks about vBulletin is it costs $160 for purchase. But sometimes it's just worth it to dish out the money. Any comments?

Used vBulletin, love the admin end, hate the user end, and I sometimes worry that the MySQL based templating system could fall over under a heavy load (vs. phpBB's file-based templating) - although it's never happened yet.

Do you think it's too complicated for most users? I thought some of vBulletin's features were quite advanced in comparrison to phpBB. I'll always be a fan of phpBB. Their code rocks. But my version when to **** about 4 months ago and I haven't had the time to fix it. So, I'm either going to dump all of the messages, reinstall it, and upload the old messages or just start from scratch with vBulletin. If vBulletin has more to offer the average user, I'd rather pay the money. I don't think $160 is too much to spend on a quality product. Even if I'm not making any money off my site at the moment.

Another question: which of the two are easier to customize from the admin side? I never really went into too much detail on phpBB, but I remember it being a pain in the butt just trying to figure out how to change the logo.

How about invision.. invision is better then both, more customizable, more choices, and stabler(less buggy).

Consider it! and it has some sexy skins!

Hmmm, I'm gonna have to look it up. Thanks.

I like phpbb just fine, and mostly because it's FREE!

vbulletin....but invision because at the moment is does the same as vbulletin, but free

Don't you have to get a license for invision to do any thing cool with it?

Anyways, I like phpbb, because most of the forums I go to use it, I like the look, and it's pretty simple, the admin end is pretty simple, but it's still custimizable with mods and what not. I'm an admin at an invision board and the admin end is a little overwhelming since there is so many bells and whistles.

you do but a lot of webhosts have a license to use it accross the whole server

Another nice one that I used once is punBB
http://www.punbb.org/

Later this year, I am going to write my own forum software if I have the time.

I'd probably go with vBulletin over Invision... I don't know about being able to do more than vBulletin, I think a lot say that because they haven't had access to the customers-only sections of the vBulletin forum and seen all the hacks & modifications people have written

yeah, compare that to http://phpbbhacks.com/ - that site is the primary reason I use phpBB most of the time.

Yeah, there's a lot of phpBB hacks, but sifting through them is a pain, and half of them want you to search for lines in code that were changed 3 versions ago and don't exist any more, so it can take a bit of work to get them working right.

But, there are also MANY MANY MANY hacks for vBulletin, and addon scripts that can utilize the vBulletin userbase (PhotoPost, etc. - although I do believe PhotoPost can also utilize a phpBB userbase & registration system too).

axe, point taken about the phpbb hacks.

I have suggested invision before, and I'm suggesting it again now. I just discovered that you can get it for free if you do enough hunting around on the site.

I started writing my own forum software today. Anyone got any feature suggestions?

User registration and the ability to post messages

rjstephens---

You should have a rating system so users can rate each post. There could just be a dialog near tha avatar on each post!