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I'm looking at forum software for a side project, and mostly wondering if phpbb is still the defacto of free solutions?

What is your favorite Forum/BBS software?

I'm currently looking for a software package that I can host and ideally free.

Currently on my radar are the following.

I would prefer a forum software in python or ruby to allow me to modify it easier when I feel the need, but I want things like threaded conversations and attachments out of the box.

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Does phpBB do threaded conversations? :S – William Hilsum Jan 13 '10 at 6:56
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Yes in the sense of you have multiple threads of conversation, but not a tree of replys. I'm only really looking for the first type, the second would simply be a bonus. – Scott Markwell Jan 13 '10 at 7:00
+1 ahh, ok! I didn't understand... I thought you meant full on multi thread such as Slashdot... I am sure that pretty much any modern forum software does what you want. – William Hilsum Jan 13 '10 at 9:49
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Consider rephrasing your question for a precise description of what you need, technically, and functionally. Do not ask for "favorite", or personal opinions, keep your question objective, or it will be closed, as it is subjective and argumentative as such. Please review the FAQ (superuser.com/faq) about the kind of questions you can ask here. – Gnoupi Jan 13 '10 at 9:56
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Here is one you should not use: "Jive Forums". We had huge stability issues with their product. Crashes few times a day. – Sorin Sbarnea May 20 '10 at 19:58
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closed as off topic by Gareth, Daniel Beck, Nifle, tombull89, Sathya♦ Sep 29 '11 at 11:26

Questions on Super User are expected to generally relate to computer software or computer hardware, within the scope defined in the faq.

2 Answers

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Wikipedia has a list of forum software developed in 'other' languages (other than ASP and PHP) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_internet_forum_software_(other).

Some software called "Forulio" seems to stick out, written in ruby with the features you wanted and it appears to be in development still, though I'll confess to having not used it myself!

http://forulio.com/

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What sort of hosting have you got? A lot of the free forums require some flavour of database as a backend, which you often don't get on cheaper hosting solutions.

I look after a database-less server like this and use YaBB as the forum as it happily works with flat files rather than needing a full database. While it won't scale quite as well as a full database backend, there are some quite large forums running on YaBB with no noticeable speed problems. It has an active add-ons community at BoardMod and is also written in fairly readable Perl (readable enough that I've hacked a few bits of it myself in the past when I couldn't find what I wanted at BoardMod). It has attachments and conversations (not the slashdot-style threads) out of the box.

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I run my own setup for hosting, so pretty much anything except Oracle is suitable. – Scott Markwell Jan 13 '10 at 15:11
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