Best free forum software of service

[scem0]

I really want to have a forum on my site, but I don't know which one to use.

I don't want to pay for one ;), so what is the best, easiest, free forum software or service?

Thanks,

scem0

[jeremy.king]

phpBB (http://www.phpbb.com) is free and has lots of mods to extend its functionality.

[Rower_CPU]

What kingjr3 said. ;)

[scem0]

Phew.

A simple answer. ;)

Thanks a bunch,

scem0

[mnkeybsness]

phpbb is for sure the best free forum software. mods can get complicated, but people will premod phpbb for download if you search around for them.

[Benjamin]

oh i see it already has been mentioned and seconded many times, another vote from me for phpbb. :)

[DreaminDirector]

Yet another vote for phpbb. I'm currently running it and it's just awesome.

[GovornorPhatt]

I love PHPBB. I have it running off a mySQL database. Installation was very easy, even for someone with little database expeirence (myself). All you have to do is FTP the folder and go to a page on the server in your browser. Then it guides you through the database setup and configures all the rest. It also allows very powerful permissions for forums and individual users. I strongly endorse phpbb. And hey, its free!

[scem0]

Yeah, i started to set it up but then realized the website hosting my site (for free it was not a .com) doesn't have MySQL support, so I couldn't do it.

I bought emoonline.com though and plan to get a host that supports mySQL.

scem0

[mnkeybsness]

I bought emoonline.com though and plan to get a host that supports mySQL.

ha ha... it took me a minute to realize that you bought the DOMAIN emoonline.com... i thought you were talking about some other forums software.

[Makosuke]

At this point phpBB is probably the safe bet, but I would like to put in a plug for SimpleMachines Forum (simplemachines.org). It's in late beta, so it's not a "right now" option, but it's also not "just another half-finished forum project"--it's actually a ground-up rewrite of YaBBSE, which is in turn a php/MySQL-based forum loosely based on the old YaBB Perl forum script.

So, there's a lot of experience behind the project, and in my opinion they did a very good job through the last revision of YaBBSE, and the SMF project has been moving along steadily. It's not open source, which would be its only disadvantage, but the dev team does appear to work hard.

I ended up going that route because I got into YaBB early on, and it was easier to go to YaBBSE than phpBB (and at the time I didn't like the phpBB interface that much, though it's gotten a lot nicer since). I don't feel like I made a mistake, though, and I'm really liking where SimpleMachines is going.

[mark-uk]

phpBB2 is a great peice of software - there are also many skins and mods available for it..