What is your favorite forum / community software?

[MannDude]

I'm curious what everyone's favorite forum / community software is, whether as an end-user or administrator, doesn't matter. There are a lot of great options out there and due to some recent gripes about IPB and lack of excitement of IPB4 I'm just wanting to look at other platforms that may be comparable or better.

(No promises though, platform changes are a huge PITA and my gripes about IPB are generally temporary...)

 

[Servers4You]

As to free forum's I'd always recommend SMF, we used to always use it for our forums (when we had them), mainly because it was simple to use and could be customized easily. However if you are looking for a top notch forum software I'd recommend Invision Power Board.

 

[Criot]

For free the best I've used would be MyBB, paid would be vBulletin, however I did always find that the MyBB Control Panels seemed a lot neater and better laid out in comparison to vBulletin, and there are a lot of addons/mods available for MyBB which meant it could be customized to offer similar functionality to vBulletin for the users.

 

[mojeda]

Free: MyBB, it has a IPB 2.2.6 look to it which I liked.

Paid: Xenforo.

I do like IPBs admin control panel,something I feel both vBulletin and Xenforo lack.

 

[drmike]

Most of these are rather similar.  I don't care which one you use  

Wait, changed my mind already, Vanilla sucks.

 

[WSWD]

Xenforo for sure. 

 

[joepie91]

Certainly not IPB. It ate my post twice yesterday because it doesn't save drafts, and breaks my form data recovery extension.

XenForo and Discourse are nice.

 

[drmike]

Joepie makes a good point on lack of draft save.  That eats my homework all the time.  But honestly, I know better than type directly into a browser

 

[joepie91]

Joepie makes a good point on lack of draft save.  That eats my homework all the time.  But honestly, I know better than type directly into a browser

The problem is that IPB doesn't use something like Markdown, so you can't do "proper" quotes unless you use IPBs own editor, unfortunately.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

IPB's drafts work just fine.  I've had it recover both replies to existing threads, and entirely new threads after either closing out the wrong tab or killing the browser proc.

In fact, is an excellent example of that.  I had all but the last paragraph or so typed, lost power, came back up on a UPS and it was still there waiting for me.

 

[drmike]

That's interesting if we actually have Draft Save function here.   With my intentionally rigged setup, something must be filtering out / pruning something that makes that work.  Apologies if so from my end.

I have other edit issues with quotes all the time where I'll toss quotes then paste in text.  Once I go to add more beneath such, I cannot and have to flip to viewing source to inject a return and filler char, then back to editing graphic side.  Might be something knocked out by my setup also.

 

[Aldryic C'boas]

Adblock/Noscript maybe?  There's few sites I visit with a GUI browser, so I run neither of those.  Unless @MannDude broke it in an update, but the autodrafts were working fine when I wrote that 'doing it wrong' piece

 

[drmike]

[SIZE=13.63636302948px]Oh yeah, I have multiple browser destroyers running [/SIZE] opcorn: 

Everything is whitelisted for vpsboard... so I thought... Clearly something is not...  I can live without those Drafts. prefer / aspire to live in word processor. Less fubars...

 

[joepie91]

The draft saving feature just started working for me like an hour ago. @MannDude did you fix something?

 

[MannDude]

IPB saves drafts?

Didn't know. Have never seen it work on my end.

No, I didn't do anything... <shrugs>

I did an update/upgrade a week or so ago that appears to have broke a few things (Sphinx search, media embedding, and a report of notifications not working but unable to replicate on my end) but haven't touched or heard about the draft feature. The other things have been fixed though.

 

[mojeda]

Draft saving feature has worked for me for quite a long time.

 

[joepie91]

IPB saves drafts?

Didn't know. Have never seen it work on my end.

No, I didn't do anything... <shrugs>

I did an update/upgrade a week or so ago that appears to have broke a few things (Sphinx search, media embedding, and a report of notifications not working but unable to replicate on my end) but haven't touched or heard about the draft feature. The other things have been fixed though.

Try typing something, and then pausing for a while. In the bar below the editor, a 'saved at <date>' text will appear. After reloading the page, you can click that bar to restore your post (it's not automatic).

... and of course that has now stopped working again.

 

[Ishaq]

I quite like esoTalk, although it's probably too simple.

 

[MannDude]

Strange. I'll continue to look into this.

 

[Mayday]

Always been a fan of VB, though as of the last 2 years I have been using IPB and find it works well for most stuff. Support though is pretty damn clueless. 3 tickets I submitted for tech issues and 3 I ended up solving myself after being annoyed with supports generic unhelpful answers.