I recommend MyBB ( www.mybboard.com ). It seems to be the best out out there. I never get spam, unless it is a human spammer. I use it on my two forums.

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MyBB or SMF, with MyBB being my personal favorite

There are also plenty of mods for it, from arcades to spell checkers

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If you like vbulletin, have a look at Mybb which (at the least) looks similar

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You are right about that. I never get any spambots on mybb forum but my other forum which is not mybb does but they say they are working on it.

Mybb and Wowbb both have great community support and mybb gets on security issues or other issues pretty quick as I have had numerous updates with them. For a ' free open source forum' I would say mybb is the way to go.

I am not to familiar with paid ones other than Wowbb.

Mybb and wowbb are both pretty easy to use as an admin to change things up and that is good for people starting out with their first forum.

I also have an e107 forum on my arcade site but never used it, maybe I will but don't really need to. So I can't really comment on it. It looks ok is all I can say.

Mybb and Wowbb both work good with Coppermine (Which is the best 'open source' Photo Gallery I have come across so far)

Not of them are that good but SMF is really bad the ACP is terrible and so is IPBs never used mybb phpbb would probably be the best bet

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I would definately recommend MyBB. It's very easy to work with and has a load of great features. There aren't that many Mods or Skins for it at the moment but it's very easy to customize the look yourself

Thanks for pointing out that part of the site, I'd not seen it before. I found it incredibly helpful, especially the comparison tool

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I personally think phpBB's admin center is terrible - especially because it uses frames.

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I'd recommend MyBB, it's the best free (as in freedom) forum software I have worked with.

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But so does VB, so that would imply that VB's ACP is bad as well.

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