Why VBulletin is better than phpBB ??

[miko67]

Basically I'm preparing ever so slowly for starting up my own forum.

In doing so I wonder :confused: What are the benefits of VBulletin that makes it worthwhile to pay for over free-ware phpBB?

Feel free to start a brand war on the subject if so inclined... in an orderly manner of course ;)

[Joeychgo]

Customizability for one - Also VBulletin is more friendly with the search engines

[SiteTutor]

Also security ... look at what happened to so many phbb's

[theMusicMan]

For an Open-Source product, phpBB is very good indeed and does come as standard featuring many useful functions for the wannabe forum owner/manager/admin. However, as Joey states, vB is far easier to customise and has all of the things that you would need to hack phpBB to do included with it already. vB is totally customisable, and easily too.

Where vB wins with zero competition is on support. phpBB's own forum has some experts of course, there are mods there who are brilliant and will try to help you no matter what. However, there are also many young power crazed mods over there who will lock your thread at the prospect of thinking about asking anything to do with another product, or perhaps the ever elusive version phpBB2.1. I used phpBB fopr 18 months, but witnessed many unnecessary run-ins between mods who thought they were and acted like God, and phpBB users/customers - not a pretty sight at all. Seeing users of phpBB being treated in this manner was a disgrace.

That aside, there really is no comparison.

[ResaleBroker]

My experiences with vBulletin support have been awesome.

[GuyFromChicago]

They key for me is the admin control panel - vBulletin's admin CP is about 100 times better than phpbb.

Security is also important...as the previous poster mentioned look at all the phpbb forums that took a dive recently.