Advice on forum software

[JIMMYD]

I thought this community looked like a good place to ask this question, after stumbling across Nebulous on the mybb site examples. All the responses I have read have had great discussion.

I need some help with selecting some forum software.

I have an active community on facebook that I want to turn into a paid subscription forum. My thoughts were to go with IPB after all the research I've done they seem to be a reliable forum and when dealing with payments I thought it would be more beneficial to use paid forum software, there has been a lot of support for Xenforo as well. Thoughts?

I will be looking at about 200 members paying an annual fee to access all areas of a forum completely locked up to non-members.

I am also looking at testing the waters with another forum it is more of a hobby/niche forum so I will be looking at free software, obviously I was looking at mybb and that's how I found this forum, but it was a decision between mybb, phpbb and SMF

SUMMARY:
- Should I pay for a licence with IPB to run a paid subscription service? Or do you have other recommendations?
- I am interested to hear your experiences with mybb,phpbb or SMF.

 

[~KAGE-008]

SMF was the software of a defunct forum I used to frequent, QX Community. Then before 2013 ended, I knew about MyBB from this forum and I'm used to it since then.

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

- Should I pay for a licence with IPB to run a paid subscription service? Or do you have other recommendations?
- I am interested to hear your experiences with mybb,phpbb or SMF.

For your purposes, you'd probably be better off using IP.Board with IP.Nexus - http://www.invisionpower.com/apps/nexus/

If you use a free software you can definitely set up paid subscription user groups, but you'd probably have to have the members pay you through PayPal manually and you'd have to add each person into the paid usergroup manually.

- I am interested to hear your experiences with mybb,phpbb or SMF.

They have been pretty good. This forum has been on phpbb, vBulletin, IPB and (now) MyBB.
PhpBB is a good software but there is too much unnecessary extra work for the admin when it comes to installing plugins, themes and general maintenance (from what I remember). vB and IPB were good but it seems like they were overly sophisticated and bloated for our needs. MyBB is simple, quick and efficient (and free! No more paying $25 every few months to keep our software up to date). Also MyBB is very user friendly and even non-tech-savvy people can navigate the forum without confusion. It also has versions of all the main plug-ins we used on IPB (reputation, forum cash, tapatalk, awards, moods, etc) so we didn't lose any functionality after converting.

 

[JIMMYD]

Thanks guys, definitely appreciate the advice, across a lot of forums you struggle to get straight up answers like this. I think I just found a new forum home!

 

[Nebulous's iconNebulous]

Thanks guys, definitely appreciate the advice, across a lot of forums you struggle to get straight up answers like this. I think I just found a new forum home!

No problem, glad to help!