I've had several different free forums for my site. Most either took a nose dive into oblivion or have so many ads that you can't tell where the forum begins and ends.

Any suggestions for a forum service? Any free ones without lots of ads?

Thanks for help.

Dave

Yes, here are some very good free bulletin boards with NO ads, but you must install them onto your own server to get them to work:

Ikonboard (uses perl/cgi and can use MySQL). I give it 7/10. It's alright, but I just don't like it.

phpBB (uses PHP and MySQL). 9/10. It's the best free bulletin board around, IMO.

But, of course you just don't get what's good unless you pay for it. vBulletin all the way!

Thanks for the suggestions. I've had several different forums on a couple of my websites and have had to close all of the ones that I've had. Ikonboard was one of them.

I've looked at the ones you've mentioned and vBulletin looks like a good choice. Free is really in my price range, but sometimes you need to sacrifice a little to make a business viable.

Thanks.

Dave

hey i though ikonboard wasnt free?... i already have a phpBB though....

No, Ikonboard is still free. Here's what it says on their website:

"It's free to use on your personal site and it's free to use on your commercial site."

I would strongly go for phpBB 2.0 as it is free and is off the charts...I use it for my support forums, VB is nice, but I dont have enough clients to pay for a VB license all the time

Whatever solution you go for, be aware that Perl forums are ok for moderate use but can put considerably more strain on a server the more popular it gets. Perl is great for text manipulation scripts, but doesn't use resources as efficiently as some of the newer technologies... particularly if the server it is running on is not Apache.

Good point, Tiggy.

Use phpBB because it uses php/MySQL and is VERY well done, as far as free forums go.