I take it the board exploded :P

I just found out they don't even have attachments as default.

Going by webhostingtalk's forums, all the threads I've seen have been in favour of vB for forum use. Same with theadminzone. phpBB doesn't get much of a mention due to lack of features and apparently security, although I haven't found anyone elaborating on the security side of things. Most of the threads I've read mention vB vs. IPB and few have phpBB in them, oddly enough. The general consensus seem to be pro-vB, although there are a few features mentioned that IPB has that I'd love. Inline moderation, mainly. Still, those are bonus features, and vB outdoes all others in that area. With regards to phpBB, without mods it's just plain crap. I guess Unne would go pro for it because of it being open source, though. If I wanted to hack a board, I'd still use vB - vbulletin.org has an endless listing of hacks that you can use for all sorts of things (including that elusive inline moderation).

The main thing, again, is the admin CP and the amount of control you have. If you're a simple person and want simple things, use IPB, sure. Hell, use the free version (is it still free, or did they change the TOS again?). If you have money, though, vBulletin is worth it, at least in my opinion (and the opinion of the majority of others). Not just because it has more features, but also because the average response time to problems is less than 30 minutes at last check, and "-1" coding or not, it still works, so what's the problem? To be honest, I wouldn't be surprised if it's possible without the -1 anyway. There are vB2 skins for vB3 available at vbtemplates (or something like that). Of all the online software/hardware/anything support groups that I've experienced (and there have been a heck of a lot, considering it's my personal support-type preference), vB are second to none.

The phpbb control panel is comparable to VB. Attachments aren't something I'd like to have on any MB I ran anyways, but there are attachment mods for phpbb (as of a year ago; probably better ones around by now). phpbb has a berjillion hacks available if you go for that kind of thing. Without mods it differs from VB in very few ways that I can remember. It's missing some of the crap VB includes which we never use, yeah. It doesn't have a calendar, for example; who ever uses the calendar? phpbb is designed to be small and fast. Fast is something EoFF could use at the moment, in my opinion, but oh well. VB is becoming bloated.

You don't have to know any more about coding to work with phpbb than to work with VB. The templates are simple HTML and CSS, from what I remember. I never touched the PHP back when I was working with phpbb, except for one little hack I added. I've had to mess with the PHP for VB many times as well. Remember when Bleys had to hack the MB every couple weeks just to get admins to have the word "admin" under their names? Remember when last week you were contemplating hacking the VB just to change how cookies work? phpbb is no worse than VB in this regard. Any MB you wish to customize beyond a certain point will require PHP knowledge.

Just because something is the most popular doesn't mean it's the best in terms of quality. Popularity is often determined by marketing more than by quality. "Everyone else likes it" is often poor justification for saying something is worthwhile. The majority of people in the world use Windows, for example. Same reason people still use MP3s even though there have been tons of far better compression schemes available. I tend to trust myself beyond the general consensus.

The real question to me is what does VB have that's different from phpbb, which would justify paying $160?

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Originally Posted by Dr Unne

The real question to me is what does VB have that's different from phpbb, which would justify paying $160?

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In the next version of PHPBB absolutly nothing and its out soon *rubs hands*

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Originally Posted by Dr Unne

The phpbb control panel is comparable to VB. Attachments aren't something I'd like to have on any MB I ran anyways, but there are attachment mods for phpbb (as of a year ago; probably better ones around by now). phpbb has a berjillion hacks available if you go for that kind of thing.

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I'd rather something that didn't need to be hacked and had it from the start. Like vB. It's better for boards of EoFF's size and nature, in my opinion.

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Without mods it differs from VB in very few ways that I can remember. It's missing some of the crap VB includes which we never use, yeah. It doesn't have a calendar, for example; who ever uses the calendar?

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Me. :(

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phpbb is designed to be small and fast. Fast is something EoFF could use at the moment, in my opinion, but oh well. VB is becoming bloated.

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vB itself has little to do with the speed issues we've been experiencing, unless you've been using Quick Reply, which I have never endorsed. The server is the problem - this is proven as we've never had any problems with vBulletin until we moved onto this server.

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You don't have to know any more about coding to work with phpbb than to work with VB. The templates are simple HTML and CSS, from what I remember. I never touched the PHP back when I was working with phpbb, except for one little hack I added. I've had to mess with the PHP for VB many times as well. Remember when Bleys had to hack the MB every couple weeks just to get admins to have the word "admin" under their names?

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Which is a problem we don't have so I don't know why you're bringing it up. I could bring up problems phpBB had before they were solved, too. I don't know of any software that has never had a problem.

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Remember when last week you were contemplating hacking the VB just to change how cookies work?

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Nope. I never contemplated hacking. I thought it was pretty clear that I was only going to mess with templates and that if a hack was needed I'd just go with 23 (which we did).

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phpbb is no worse than VB in this regard. Any MB you wish to customize beyond a certain point will require PHP knowledge.

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I don't know PHP at all but if I wanted to mess around to get phpBB to look like vBulletin, I'm pretty sure I would need to.

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Just because something is the most popular doesn't mean it's the best in terms of quality. Popularity is often determined by marketing more than by quality. "Everyone else likes it" is often poor justification for saying something is worthwhile. The majority of people in the world use Windows, for example. Same reason people still use MP3s even though there have been tons of far better compression schemes available. I tend to trust myself beyond the general consensus.

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I agree, but I don't see anything wrong with the quality of vB. Where are the problems? You had to put a -1 in? Is that really a problem if it works? It still runs smoothly, you can turn off the features if you don't want them, the support is nigh on perfect, the templates are easy to work around (yes, they are - I figured the majority of it out myself and am confident I could have done it all if I didn't have help, not that I don't appreciate it (I love help)), you don't have to hack it to death like you do with phpBB... the main improvement since vB2 that I really enjoy is that most things that you used to need to hack for now don't need a hack at all - you just put what you want into the templates and be done with it.

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The real question to me is what does VB have that's different from phpbb, which would justify paying $160?

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All the features it has, the incredible support and what is in my opinion most important - the Admin CP. From what I've read in the threads, phpBB loses out because it's designed to be so simple. Maybe that's the overall difference. Simple Forums vs. Feature/Control Forums. If you want to have a hell of a lot of control over how your board looks and works without having to hack the place to death, use vBulletin. If you want to have to go for hacks and would rather keep things simple, go for phpBB. If you don't think it's coded well but you can still work the place to do what you want, where are the problems?

If you honestly feel that you could get phpBB to operate as it does now using a phpBB and have the speed of the forums increase in any slightly significant way, you should probably talk to Cid about getting it done, because every little helps. :p

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Originally Posted by Baloki

In the next version of PHPBB absolutly nothing and its out soon *rubs hands*

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No point in arguing by depending on the future. See IPB for details on that one. :p

EDIT: Having said that, I'd like to note that while I am firm in my opinion and belief that vBulletin is superior to phpBB and IPB and other such boards, I won't discount that other boards may be more advanced than vB in the future - I do keep an eye on phpBB 2.2 from time to time.

[qq]You had to put a -1 in? Is that really a problem if it works? [/qq]

That's just one example, and it took me days to figure that out. Yes, it is a problem. I shouldn't have to deal with broken HTML. I thought the whole point of VB's great admin CP was that I shouldn't have to deal with CSS and source code at all? VB has all those 47 million little template input boxes where you put your style options, but I had to bypass those myself and fix their HTML because the layout uses tables embedded in tables embedded in more tables.

phpbb's templates are all files. You edit them as files and upload them. VB makes you use thier web-editing form, right? With VB I feel like I'm building a site using Tripod site-builder.

[qq]If you want to have a hell of a lot of control over how your board looks and works without having to hack the place to death, use vBulletin.[/qq]

I said above, I never had to hack phpbb to death. I touched the PHP once, and that was to edit a regex dealing with how the code tag parses certain control characters. I had to edit that EXACT thing on this VB3 as well.

Why do you think it's necessary to hack phpbb to death?

[qq]All the features it has, the incredible support and what is in my opinion most important - the Admin CP.[/qq]

All the features meaning what specifically? The calendar? I don't think a calendar is worth $160.

As I said, the CP in phpbb is comparable to VB. There is very little difference. It's been a while, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything useful the phpbb CP couldn't do that VB could. http://www.phpbb.com/demo.php is a demo of the phpbb cp, you can take a look and tell me what it's missing if you'd like.

The support for VB might be better, if you care for such things. But phpbb has a nice active community as well.

[qq]If you honestly feel that you could get phpBB to operate as it does now using a phpBB and have the speed of the forums increase in any slightly significant way, you should probably talk to Cid about getting it done, because every little helps.[/qq]

I tend to be ignored when it comes to any sort of decision like this, and it's not my decision in any case. Also, I'm not willing to do that much work unless it was necessary, which it isn't. VB functions. VB has already been paid for; might as well get use out of it anyways. I am sure that EoFF could run on a phpbb; like I said, I go to larger MBs than this one that use phpbb just fine. Depends what you want though. It'd be missing a lot of the extraneous crap that VB3 gives you. No pointless javascript-animated dropdown search boxes for example.

[qq]vB itself has little to do with the speed issues we've been experiencing, unless you've been using Quick Reply, which I have never endorsed.[/qq]

Strangely enough, I seem to recall the need to dump our file attachments out of the database and into files for this very reason.

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Originally Posted by Dr Unne

Strangely enough, I seem to recall the need to dump our file attachments out of the database and into files for this very reason.

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That was an attempt to speed up the db, yes. If we were using phpBB with attachments being stored in the db, it would have had the same chunk of bytes. It's not vB's fault that someone for some strange unknown reason decided to store files in the db. I know it wasn't mine. If it was a vB2 function, then I'm glad they changed it. I don't know if it made a huge difference to speed, though. The server was the thing that screwed up. Before moving to this server, we were doing absoloutely fine. Although if I'd known the images were being stored in the db I'd have suggested we change it before we moved servers anyway.

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It'd be missing a lot of the extraneous crap that VB3 gives you. No pointless javascript-animated dropdown search boxes for example.

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Like I said, that's a matter of opinion. Some people don't like simplicity, some people like luxury-features. I do.

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phpbb's templates are all files. You edit them as files and upload them. VB makes you use thier web-editing form, right? With VB I feel like I'm building a site using Tripod site-builder.

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Instead of having to do everything via FTP, why not have an inbuilt system where you can just hit 'save' or whatever on your page and have it save directly to the server where you can see the results? Oh, wait, that's what vB does. I don't see how that's a disadvantage. In fact, I'd say it's an advantage.

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Why do you think it's necessary to hack phpbb to death?

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I don't think it's "necessary", I just feel phpBB is lacking if you don't do it. I do like things such as attachments and calendars, and I do find them to be incredibly useful - particularly the former.

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As I said, the CP in phpbb is comparable to VB. There is very little difference. It's been a while, but I'm having trouble thinking of anything useful the phpbb CP couldn't do that VB could. http://www.phpbb.com/demo.php is a demo of the phpbb cp, you can take a look and tell me what it's missing if you'd like.

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First thing I noticed (the first thing I was looking for) was the lack of Custom User Fields - I like those a lot. But that's not a majorly important thing. It doesn't look like there are many usergroup options. At least not that I can see. This is why I'm looking forward to the phpBB 2.2 admin CP. I can't wait to see how well it operates, as it looks pretty good. The demo shown at that link seems very very... uh... timid? Simple. Lacking specific options. I can't get it to do specific things that I want it to do. There are few things that, using vB3, I can't get configured. And I'm not a code-techy kinda guy, so yeah. Usergroups, I feel, are a pretty major thing, though. Of course, having said that, I get the feeling the demo doesn't show exactly what they can do on phpBB, or at least it's not obvious where to change them around. If you think the current phpBB admin CP is anything close to the vB3 admin CP, I'm sorry Unne, but you've got to be either blind, ignorant, bias or generally lacking intellect in how to operate an admin CP, and I know you're not blind, I know you're not lacking intellect, so it's either bias or ignorant - and I can't imagine you'd be ignorant. To say the phpBB is close to the vB3 admin CP is a joke. I can accept that some of the things you say have some substance, such as poor coding (you're far more advanced in that area than I am, so I do trust your better judgement) and, to a very small extent, speed (vB3 runs a lot of features, however I feel that most of them - not including Quick Reply - warrant the small speed difference), but I think the idea of the admin CP's being comparable is laughable. At least the default one. I'm guessing that "with a simple edit to the files which you would have to upload" you can fix that. Of course, with an edit to the files which you have to upload, you can make almost any forum system do whatever you want, much like many other forms of online software.

Sorry if this post is all out of order with yours, I didn't think I was going to post anything beyond the first quote but I figured I may as well. I don't get to debate this kind of stuff with many people anyways.

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Originally Posted by Loony BoB

That was an attempt to speed up the db, yes. If we were using phpBB with attachments being stored in the db, it would have had the same chunk of bytes.

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But phpBB doesn't use DB attachements nor does it use DB avatars for that very reason: doing so is deathly slow and inefficient. Having the avatars in the database could mean as much as 25 extra database connection per topic page which is such a waste of CPU and disk resources. phpBB stores them as normal files on the server. This is one bad feature of vB that they have doggedly clung to for so long. I'm glad they finally give the option to use normal files instead.

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Instead of having to do everything via FTP, why not have an inbuilt system where you can just hit 'save' or whatever on your page and have it save directly to the server where you can see the results? Oh, wait, that's what vB does. I don't see how that's a disadvantage. In fact, I'd say it's an advantage.

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phpBB2 does have a template editor built in. There is a more comprehensive and powerful one being included in v2.2 (which will be out soon W00t! :D )

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It doesn't look like there are many usergroup options.

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What?? phpBB was the board that invented the enhanced user group system. In other words, it was the first board to even allow members to be subscribed to multiple user groups at once (with permission precedence). vB and IPB finally added (copied) that feature in the latest releases.

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Originally Posted by Samuraid

But phpBB doesn't use DB attachements nor does it use DB avatars for that very reason: doing so is deathly slow and inefficient. Having the avatars in the database could mean as much as 25 extra database connection per topic page which is such a waste of CPU and disk resources. phpBB stores them as normal files on the server. This is one bad feature of vB that they have doggedly clung to for so long. I'm glad they finally give the option to use normal files instead.

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Yeah, as I said, now vB3 has the option to use file usage so it's not really an arguable point, that's all I was saying, pretty much.

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phpBB2 does have a template editor built in. There is a more comprehensive and powerful one being included in v2.2 (which will be out soon W00t! :D )

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Yeah, I'm looking forward to checking out the admin CP in v2.2 as well. I was arguing with Unne regarding him saying that using a template editor sucks. I don't get that.

What's up with everyone saying it should be out soon, by the way? It's been ten months or so in the works so far and I looked for announcements saying that it'll be out soon and couldn't find any. Do you guys have any dates or anything? That'd be great.

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What?? phpBB was the board that invented the enhanced user group system. In other words, it was the first board to even allow members to be subscribed to multiple user groups at once (with permission precedence). vB and IPB finally added (copied) that feature in the latest releases.

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Must be a problem with the demo admin CP then. But if it invented the advanced user group system, why are so many of the user options in the main admin CP, such as PM limits etc? Surely these should be adjustable by usergroup? Or maybe that's just another bug with the demo... it kinda surprised me that I couldn't do that, too, so I thought it might be just a demo problem, guess it is. As for 'inventing' usergroups, I'd be careful with labelling it 'inventing' as enhanced usergroups have been around long before forums in general, so I wouldn't be surprised if some other board out there had them. And I'd be surprised if all the major boards didn't have a hack available. That would be... odd. But yeah, it's always difficult to say who invented those kind of things first. Most features on any board are invented by some random member of the public at a hacking board long before they make it into one of the main products.

The enhanced usergroups depends on the skin, my skin on my board doesn't have them active along with the default skin and going by what the PHPBB forums say should be early next year :D

psoTFX posted in his blog that phpBB2.2 was likely going to be in beta by the end of the year.

[qq]It's not vB's fault that someone for some strange unknown reason decided to store files in the db. [/qq]

It's the fault of VB programmers for making it the default option.

[qq]If you think the current phpBB admin CP is anything close to the vB3 admin CP, I'm sorry Unne, but you've got to be either blind, ignorant, bias or generally lacking intellect in how to operate an admin CP, and I know you're not blind, I know you're not lacking intellect, so it's either bias or ignorant - and I can't imagine you'd be ignorant.[/qq]

Could you give specific examples of what the VB CP does that the phpbb CP doesn't, please? You said usergroups. phpbb does those; it's under Group Admin. phpbb doesn't have an inline template editor; I don't like that, so I think that's a good thing. If phpbb2 is adding an inline editor, then I will say that's a bad thing. phpbb looks different, yes. It doesn't have tons of Javascript eye-candy; I consider that a good thing, because half the time VB's javascript breaks the Back button in my browser when I'm working the CP.

What else is it lacking specifically? "Specifically" being the key word here.

EDIT: So far as not liking inline web-form template editors, I don't like it because text editors are so much more powerful. Compared to using vim and a simple FTP program (ncftp), writing code in a web form is like trying to type blindfolded with my toes. Syntax highlighting, progressive searching, embedded Perl regex search-and-replace, auto-indenting, etc. If you use Notepad to write code or something, then a web form might save you some time. I'm too used to hitting :wqALTF1uparrowENTERoENTERALTF3i for example.

I installed a CVS snapshot of phpbb 2.1.2 (the development version of what will become phpbb 2.2).

http://phpbb22.dailyyams.com/index.php?sid=

You can access the cp features with:

user: 'test dummy'
pass: 'testdummy'

Check it out. I like it.

Remaining problem - I think this is left over from when "the board exploded".

On the 'Reply to Thread' page, the buttons for Bold, Italic, Underline, Align Left, Align Center, Align Right, Indent and Create List are all dark - so dark they're practically invisible against the page background. Someone mentioned this one earlier, but it's still there...

Thanks, Yams. I was wondering why Unne thought that the demo he linked to was anything close to vB, given that I couldn't seem to get to the usergroups functions. Still, even while looking at the actual admin CP itself...

One thing I really really like about this admin CP is it as the "Reason for ban" option. In fact, I've already asked for this option at vBulletin a few months or so ago, so that just goes to show how much I like the idea. So don't think I'm being completely bias - I always said I liked the look of the up and coming phpBB admin CP. It's still lacking the control of vB's but it's getting there. But that's not what I'm here to go on about, I'm here to point out what it doesn't have.

Manage Users gave me a blank page, so forgive me if that lead to any of the functions shown above - I'm not sure why I got the blank page. I'm guessing it's something Yams has set rather than phpBB.

Usergroup options. "Can send Private Messages" - but to how many people at a time? And how many PM's can they hold altogether? I like usergroups not because I can say "Yes/No" to things but more because I like to be able to set different limits. I like how you can easily set the usergroup colours but it doesn't seem to list a bold/italics option or anything similar. Are these determined purely by phpBB and/or mods? The amount of usergroup options that I can find easily is very low in comparison to vB. Let's compare.

Title - both have this.
Description - both have this.
User Title - both have this (Group Rank in phpBB)
Username HTML Markup - phpBB has colour only.
Password Expiry - vB only.
Password History - vB only.
Viewable on showgropus - vB only.
Birthdays viewable - vB only.
Viewable on the memberlist - vB only.
Allow users to have member goups - vB only (this has to do with secondary groups, which I don't believe

...okay, Unne, I know you can see both admin CP's so you should be able to see the rest. The difference on usergroups is massive and vB's is far, far superior when you're dealing with a place like EoFF, which currenly relies on a large amount of usergroups (including secondary groups). We could get by using just primary usergroups, too, but then we'd have even more seperate usergroups, I think... not sure on more, but you get the idea. Most of our usergroups wouldn't be possible using the phpBB admin CP that I was looking at on Yams' test dummy thingy.

I haven't gone through every area of the admin CP just yet but I don't think phpBB has:

Repair/Optimize Tables
Diagnostics (lovely feature, that)
I don't think I can find forum stats (ie registration etc), which I thought would be one of the things that would be default with any board. I might have missed it somewhere...?
Smilies Grouping
Subscriptions (this covers a large amount of things)
Advanced Custom User Profile Fields (more options as to whether a user has to select an option on a drop down menu or not, whether it can be searchable or is visible at all and other nitpicky things like that)
Automatic Promotions (user titles for those here for longer then 8 months etc), another usergroup problem - usergroups is the main problem that I can see, actually.
IP Search (see notes on forum stats, surely they have this...)
Create users (possibly something I can't see as it's under manage users, most likely)
Mailing lists
View Banned Users page
Referrals
PM Stats
Merge Users (something that we should probably take advantage of here at EoFF, but don't as of yet)
The OPTION to use db storage for attachments (although I don't know if there is any advantage to this at all :p)
Calendar (and therefore events etc, I think)
Who Voted
Strip Poll
FAQ Manager (although I've never really liked vB's version of it, at least it's there)
Announcements (I think?)
Phrase Manager (once I learned how it worked, I really liked it! I abused it heavily when playing with eyesoffff and it's good fun :D)
More (and better) forum-specific-options (although some in phpBB I'd like at vB, too, such as threads-per-page)
Inline template editor

As for what you said regarding the template editor, I agree - I use CuteHTML when editing templates at vB. However, it's a lot easier to copy/paste from the template editor than it is to download/upload files all day. The template editor is smooth and if you want to make a quick, simple change then it's easy as hell. You may as well think of it as an in-built FTP program designed for templates. It effectively downloads when you select it and uploads when you save it, right? Nothing wrong with it at all. Don't know what your problem is with it, but oh well.

And that's the phpBB 2.1.2 development admin CP? I've always said that I liked the look of the future release of phpBB. It looks promising. However I don't know if 2.1.2 is an official release yet. I don't know much about how that works... you said it's a development admin CP and I don't get what you mean by that. Either way, it's promising but I still think it couldn't run EoFF as it is now, java or not.

And yes, I know not all of those features I listed are used by EoFF, but a lot of them are. And I've said it dozens of times, if you like simplicity, then good for you, but just because you like simplicity doesn't mean much. "I could get this place to work just like it does now using phpBB, only it wouldn't have a lot of the features" is effectively saying "I couldn't get this place to work like it does now using phpBB." I don't care if you don't like the features - if you want to make a feature-lessened skin, go for it. I know there are some premade, actually - I use an 'imageless' skin at Aiyon, which loads bloody fast but still has all the features. Maybe my work's connection is just that great, I dunno. I use a lot of the features EoFF doesn't use at Aiyon, actually. It's possibly more customised than EoFF is.

Oh yeah. I just realised I didn't even check the vBulletin settings, which number in the hundreds. I can't be bothered, though. You can go see them for yourself if you haven't already.

For anyone who doesn't know the vB CP: http://www.vbulletin.com/admindemo.php 'tis sexy.

I could go on forever about the advantages vB has over phpBB but I think I'll give in to the fact that Unne just personally likes phpBB better for reasons involving simplicity and possibly a his normal manner of going for opensource material rather than pay material. Debating this kind of thing with someone who in my opinion is either blind or heavily bias towards his preference is probably a waste of time, with or without facts. If you admit that some of the things I'm saying are indeed true (hell, I've done it for you), then it would show you're at least being reasonable. I shouldn't have to name all those features because you can go see them for yourself whenever you want and I'm sure you know them already. I apologise profusely (I think that's the word :() if most of the features are in phpBB but I didn't know how to find them or couldn't find them because they were inaccessable to me.

As for simplicity, it's a matter of preference. But I do know that vB gives you more control and more power without having to hack files. I'm talking about the default boards, not modded boards (EDIT: And if you want simplicity, you can get vB3 to be simple if you want, even more simple than phpBB, but going backwards is easy for any board :p). If we talk about modded boards, there is no winner as any board can be modded to do absoloutely anything you want if you know how to hack it right.

I think one of the vB admins said it best - if you don't want the features and don't have that kind of money to spend, then use a free board. When you have that kind of money available and you do want the features, they'll be there waiting for you. EoFF can afford the features and dammit, they're bloody good to us and some of the features are worth the money. If the only reason Cid would not go for vB was money I'd buy the vB for him. vB is the better board. The price is worth it only depending on how much you have to spend.

Big D - I'll try to get that fixed when I go home, I'll have to find the old files, not sure if I have them on my PC but I'm pretty sure they're up at Aiyon so I'll just steal them from there if I have to.

phpbb 2.1.2 is a development version. It's not supposed to be used in a production environment. The snapshot I got comes out every hour, so the one I have installed is already outdated. The developers might break some features one hour and fix them the next. It's all in an attempt to see what they can and can't do.

Sure it has features missing that vB has, but it's not missing $160 worth of features. As for support, their forums are great. Even if I had a vB license, I wouldn't ever call their tech support line. Most problems can be fixed on one's own (or at least that's what I've found).

Oh, and the demo cp Unne linked to you is phpbb 2.0 (the current stable release of phpbb). phpbbhacks.com has prehacked versions of phpbb2, some with more features than vB. Of course I would never install a bloated forum.