want to place a Forum on our website; which would be the best choice?

[deezines]

I want to start a Forum on our website,

www.thisworks.co.uk

we aim at SME's, and the Forum is going to be placed on the Yellow Pages advertising page.

The idea will be to start off with relatively few topics, and build as more users come.

Which Forum would you feel would be best suited?
Either free or paid for.


please explain why you go for the choice you nominate.

Thanks in advance.
C.S.

[megamoose]

Personally I would start off with a free board. You don't know how active/worthwhile your board is going to be. If you haven't spent any money on the board and it fails you will have lost nothing but time.

If the forum does extremely well you can convert easily to a paid host by using a converter they will provide. Some will even do it for you.

The best free board scripts IMO are phpBB3 and SMF.

Go with phpBB if you want a script that is easy to manage users, has quite a good load of basic features with it. Go with SMF if you want a script that doesn't have too many features initially but has lots of modules/addons you can install.

As phpBB3 in quite new there aren't as many mods as their are with SMF.

The choice is yours

Mark

[Bernard]

If you are serious about this as a permanent addition and not just experimenting, I would go for vBulletin. It has the best backend system that I have seen - very nice for making modifications that don't cause headaches when you have to install updates.