[WEB] Question, what would you pick.

[Dylan]

Even though I love IPBoard, for a gaming community with multiple gameservers and their own management teams I'd go for PhpBB or another kind of forum software where you're able to set group leaders (unless you dont mind giving management teams admin access to the full group settings etc).

SMF sucks in my opinion, but you guys have to understand that plugins (like the form one) aint possible in a few other forum softwares (unless you find a developer that makes them for you). So make sure you really want to switch before proceeding. Each forum software has positive and negative points. If I were you @Brian I'd just stick with SMF and let a professional designer etc design a new custom forum theme.

[clancker]

I would definitely go with phpbb, currently being free, and aswell as one of the most updated and stable software out there.

[Bruce.]

I would definitely go with phpbb, currently being free, and aswell as one of the most updated and stable software out there.

Yes it has been suggested multiple times but it is not that nice to use when on a multi-gaming community.

[Danny Soulson]

You might also want to consider Flarum (https://discuss.flarum.org/t/support). It's a new concept but it is surprisingly effective.

I've used flarum. Its good for simple "discussion" side of things though for this i would recommend either MyBB or NodeBB.

I've used MyBB in the past its the best for being "modern" and having tons of features.

NodeBB is better to go with if you are looking for a modern discussion type of forum.

I've used xenforo, looks good an all. But man i had a painfull time figuring out stuff.

Also there is vanillaforums, used them, but im not really supportive regarding those since i had tons of problems with it.

I would say best to go for is MyBB it has TONS of features and  a lot of ways to modify your forum. Also its open source ^^

All the forums i stated, I used and installed.

[Eternal_007]

Elkarte, phpBB, IPB or vBulletin!

Same tbh!

[Mex]

Here are some crucial points to keep in mind.

Features

Does the new software include all of the features that are commonly used in the old software?

Security

Is the software still in active development? If so, bugs can still be fixed.
Has the software been around for a fair amount of time? (A few years) If so, there is more chance that bugs have already been fixed.

Future

Is the software competitive with other software? If so, this implies the software is not dieing out.

Performance

Can the software provide fast page load with a huge amount of data, for different types of data? Such as accounts and posts.

Code Quality

Is the software using modern coding approaches, or messy outdated approaches? Tidy modern code is more secure and easier for both their developers and your developers to build features upon.

Customization

Does the software support customizing the design sufficiently? If so, this prevents rewriting their code.
Does the software support plugins? And is the plugin API good enough? If the plugin API covers a lot, there should be a wide range of plugins available.

Migration

It doesn't really matter if the software doesn't provide tools to migrate from old software to new software, because this can be done as a one off task manually by developers with several SQL statements.