Quote: "Apart from the shamelessness?"
Says a regular on our forums, lol.
Quote: "What actually makes SMF stand out as different? I've heard it's pretty much the best forum type that exists, but why is that?"
There's quite a few reasons:
* When you create a PHPBB forum, it says "PHPBB" right in your URL, making it rediculously simple for bots to find your forums. With SMF, it doesn't make it as easy to find. On our website, we had so many bots at one point that I thought about dropping the forums completely. I was talked into using SMF by others on TGC, and since then we've seen drastic changes... only one bot has ever posted on our new SMF forums.
The Coral is a Merseyside indie band I'm quickly becoming a fan of. Even with masking their forum name so it doesn't say "PHPBB" in the title, look at how many bots they have on their site.
* Other than that, security is top-class in SMF, unlike PHPBB. It's integrated directly into the system, whereas in PHPBB, you need to mod the crap out of your forums to improve the security, and even then, it never seems like it's enough. We did a dozen mods to the PHPBB forums... with each mod it kept the bots away for a few hours, some of them even a full day or two, but they always got in.
* Aesthetic quality. PHPBB forums are, well, ugly and poorly designed. Regardless of what skin you throw on your PHPBB forum, it looks rough and unprofessional. Compare that to SMF, with clean, smooth lines and about 10 skins for every single PHPBB skin. Oh, and making your own custom skins is easier on SMF, or so I'm told, so you can make an SMF forum look like it's integrated into your website directly, and not just an ammendment.
* Manageability is a BREEZE with SMF, whereas with PHPBB, it can get annoying. Making mods, various classes of visitors, new boards and sections, altering the status of a visitor... you can modify more aspects of an SMF forum with the administration panel than you can with PHPBB.
* Ease of Registration. Signing up on the more-secure SMF forum is easier, less time-consuming, safer, and more reliable than PHPBB. At one point we had a problem where people with yahoo email addresses couldn't register on our forums. It wouldn't send the automated confirmation email to the new forum member, so we had to manually allow anyone and everyone with a yahoo address. Fixing it was a major headache that took a few days if I remember correctly. With SMF, everything is a lot faster and filters out bots more natively, with minimum hassle for human members.
* Installation with SMF is hands-down easier than PHPBB. It takes a hundredth of the time, especially considering you don't need to modify SMF for security and/ or functionality. And if you do have to modify SMF, it's a million times easier than PHPBB, which requires you to go into the code and adjust stuff there.
I could go on, but those are the main reasons why SMF beats PHPBB, for me anyway
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