What forum software do you use and why?  If you were to install a new one, would you stay with that or go with another?

If you do not use a forum for your game, what is behind the decision not to use one?

I'm seeking your recommendations for a replacement to the PHPbb we are using now.. hopefully one that doesn't act as a hacker magnet, is reasonably secure, but not so convoluted that a non-coder (me) can't install, skin and keep alive..

I've always used PunBB (). It's easy to install, really fast and stripped down by default. Fortunately there are a ton of modifications out there to add missing functionality.

We are currently working on creating our own. It will let us incorporate the forums better into the whole web site and the mud, using mud login data should keep us spammer-free, and it gives us exactly the structure and possibilities we want. And while the forum packages can be reskinned, making them fit into our site layout would be a chore - and we wanted to keep the graphical design uniform. (Some screenshots of the work in progress: , , .)

That is pretty admirable, and I would agree it is probably the best situation if you have someone able to write one. I have used vBulletin, phpBB, UBB, and a few others over the years, and honestly I find them all mediocre at best. Every single one of them shares two of the same major problems:

1) If you want to customize it at all, it gets massively fubared whenever you need to apply updates.

2) Security holes: there appear to be tons of them, and since there are so few major BB packages, the jackasses out there hacking them are able to affect a lot of people with minimal effort.

We use Simple Machines. It's pretty easy to use, all around.

We use vBulletin, after a few years of using phpBB. I thought phpBB was more flexible/customizable than vBulletin - but our hosting service found it was also just hellish when it came to dealing with hackers. So, we went with vBulletin, which is a bit better about that.

[misread original post; pls. ignore]

I use invision, all the way.