Chat Board Software?

[EmporerEJ]

I'm looking for free, or very very low cost board software like V.Bulletin.
It's for a non-adult, small town community website.

I figured if anyone knew, it would be fellow board people.

Any ideas/experiences to share?

[MrYum]

I'm not aware of any free solutions...

But, a big fan of VBulletin. Just installed some changes that cut my forum spammers down to nothing. Nice to finally get ahead of the cocksuckers.

[cd34]

phpbb.com isn't bad. Certainly has its quirks, but, is free, has a large userbase (which means security holes are found reasonably quickly).

Until recently -- roughly vb 3.5 or so, they were roughly the same performance. vb handled attachments poorly, phpbb did a pretty good job. Where phpbb was a pain for moderators, vb had moderation down to a science.

You could start with phpbb, and there is an importer.

There used to be a system by the midgard people that actually was a 'community portal in a box'. The problem with midgard is that to get it performing well, you need the apache module version, which is an issue if you aren't able to install modules. But, their community portal was almost perfect for housing associations, small towns, etc.

You might also consider one of the CMSs that has a forum built in (along with a lot of other features) so that you can do scheduling, news, event announcements, etc. Personally, I don't like phpnuke, but, there is postnuke.com. Drupal isn't too bad. Mambo is another alternative along with Joomla, but, Mambo takes a bit of cpu horsepower and does seem to get hit with security releases a little more frequently, but, has a pretty good setup.

You can also head to cmsmatrix.org, narrow the search, and checkbox the options you're looking for and it'll narrow down the field. Its a little biased towards WebGUI as it is maintained by plainblack, but, short of that, it is a pretty good tool to narrow the search. WebGUI is not bad if you have mod_perl and the ability to do a few server tweaks.

[EmporerEJ]

WOW!
Thanks. That's a pile of information. I understand about 10% of what you said there.
It appears you know a considerable amount on the subject.
So, here's the thing:

It's for a small town chat board. I'm funding the website out of my pocket, which is why I'm looking for the free stuff. Especially if I turn this into a campaign at some point for council.
It doesn't need to be fancy. I'm looking for very basic, no frills, just a way for people to post up and talk. I'll have to find a low cost/free host to run from, or hang it off one of my business servers. Although I'm loath to connect this to my "Day Job." Adds a layer of problems that have no bearing on the community website.
If you were gonna make a choice, and wanted SIMPLE, basic, reliable, "plug it in and it works," software, which would you choose?

And thanks for your expertise.

[cd34]

It really depends on your requirements.

http://www.phpbb-portal.com/ gives you a pretty basic setup with a forum and a few portal items.

http://postnuke.com/ has quite a few more modules which they call blocks or plugins depending on the functionality.
http://community.postnuke.com/module...play-pid-7.htm

If you are looking for more of an announcement/discussion community site, I would probably lean towards phpbb/phpbb-portal.

If you wanted something more dynamic with event scheduling, local temperature, preferences, user picture uploads (i.e. community events, photo galleries, etc), I would probably lean towards postnuke. (Postnuke has a module that embeds phpbb)

Either way, your forum will be based on phpbb, which can be pretty easily migrated to vbulletin. As for the CMS portion of either setup, vbPortal is a bit more difficult to import data into.

[Smutferret]

Hey EmporerEJ,

I grabbed these links out of my bookmarks...

SMF
Mercury Board
Phorum

I haven't actually used any off these boards but you might want to check them out. I would start by looking through their support forums first, to get a feel for things.

Good luck...

Regards,
SF