Any recommendations for a forum engine (phpBB etc.)

I’m setting up a simple site as a community. It doesn’t need to be anything fancy - just a clean, uncluttered forum. The audience is non-technical.

Has anyone had any good/bad experiences?

I usually implement SMF for my client. Because from what I read, SMF is much simpler then phpBB which is suitable for me. But the main drawback from this forum is it easy being targeted by spammer. Even when I set the security for the maximum (without any anti-spam extension installed), I still got 1 or 2 newly spammer registered a day. Don’t know whether other forum system also meet this problem or not…

I use SMF as well, but their development team has been slacking a bit lately…not much for new features/releases lately…

You can’t go wrong with phpBB or SMF - and I’ve used both.

Yes, SMF has been very slow moving lately.

And that was the reason why I switched to using FluxBB instead.

FluxBB is very lean in comparison, and is forked from PunBB by developers who didn’t like that it was commercialised.

It’s very light and feature rich. I can recommend it. :)

I haven’t tried integrating it yet, but it looks like it’s really easy.

I’ve also tried Vanilla forum, but didn’t like it much.

another candidate bbpress

fluxbb really cool too

I’m looking at Vanilla at the moment. It doesn’t have a critical mass yet, but it seems fairly clean and easy to use.

If you want to try and integrate FluxBB, here is a great article on how someone integrated it into CakePHP. I will be following this in the next few weeks to integrate FluxBB into a client site.