I have been asked on many occasions as to why I use phpbb3 as my forum and not other forums such as vBulletin.

The reasons for this is simple. It comes down to these main reasons:

Cost

Of course, Free. It comes under the GNU (General Public Licence). Which means it’s free to use and share. This is great for webmaster starting their first forum and don’t want to pay.

Open Source

phpbb3 is open source which means anyone, including you, can edit or modify any part of the software however much you want. This is great for webmasters who like to edit pieces of code to make it work better for your requirements. Being open source also means anyone can develop the software and improve it. So instead of having a few guys working on it, developers from all over the world are continously improving the software.

Security

phpbb3 is continously tested for exploits and vulnerabilities to keep sure it is as secure as possible. There has been paid security audits on the forum and they found no major security holes to this day. I believe there have been no reported hackings of phpbb3 forums due to errors of the system - which is nice to know! Compare this with other forums such as vBulletin and it’s pretty impressive.

Ease Of Use

phpbb3 is very easy to use, and i stress, very! The user interface is clean and easy to follow. This is a big advantage of phpbb3 - even if you don’t have any webmaster knowledge, you can still run a sucessful forum and know how to administrate everything.

SEO

‘Search Engine Optimized’. Something all webmasters look for (or should) to get better search engine rankings and to get indexed better. I have to be honest, the defualt phpbb3 SEO isn’t very good. In fact it’s quite poor.

For example, a topic named ‘Should Xbox Live Be Free?’ would be shown like this:

Page Title: AciidForums - View Topic - Should Xbox Live Be Free?
Page URl: http://aciidforums.com/viewtopic.php?f=115&t=1187

Which isn’t very well optimized. But if you were to a simple SEO mod, the forum can be displayed like this:

Page Title: Should Xbox Live Be Free? - Xbox360 - AciidForums
Page URl: http://aciidforums.com/cat/xbox360/should-xbox-live-be-free

This is much better and more SEO. The title is more keyword relevant and the URL contains keywords and no ‘?’ and ‘=’ which search engine crawlers dont like. So with the use of a good SEO mod, phpbb3 is good for SEO and search engine rankings

Mods

Because phpbb3 is open source, this means developers are able to create their own modifications for others to use on their forums. An example of this is the SEO mod I mentioned, there was a demand for better SEO and in responce a developers decided to create a mods and share them. There is a huge selection of decent mods to choose from. They firstly appear in the ‘development’ forum on phpbb.com as they are developed and improved. This is a great way for them to gain feedback from others to help improve it. You can install these mods at any point, but this is at your own risk as they have not been validated by the phpbb.com team. A validation means the mod has met their coding guidlines, eg. no security flaws. But in general mods are safe to install, just make sure you back up first!

Themes

Popularity

Continued Updates

more coming soon