Photoshop

Charms board powered by smf. Automatic detection of the forum engine

Hello, Khabravchane!

Recently I got puzzled by the idea of creating a forum. Now the creation of a forum does not give a lot of work for users, since there are a fairly large number of ready-made forum CMS that greatly facilitate the implementation of this task. It's just that among their abundance, it can be very difficult to choose the really necessary CMS. Therefore, I decided to write my own review, which, at least a little, but perhaps, will help the user to make a choice in the direction of one or another engine.

Free engines

#1 - PunBB
Nice and easy-to-use engine. Convenient and intuitive admin panel interface. The forum is very compact, has a small number of functions (from under the box), but this can be easily corrected by additions. Convenient and easy to create themes. If you are looking for a forum that is simple and easy to set up, configure and use, this is the perfect choice.
- Russian-speaking community

There are many more different engines that I did not include in the review, because I think that they are not as popular and in demand as the ones mentioned above. Well, as for my subjective opinion, I would recommend PunBB or XenForo.

Tags: create forum, forum cms, forum engine

This article is not subject to comment, since its author is not yet a full member of the community. You will be able to contact the author only after he receives an invitation from someone from the community. Until then, its username will be hidden by an alias.

Tours and holidays in Australia

Internet forums are one of the most popular types of Internet resources. This is understandable, since forums are an ideal platform for free communication of visitors. A forum is a great way to organize a community on your site and build a consistent audience of visitors.

There are many forum engines out there. I have long wanted to make an overview of the forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is a topic for a separate article.

When choosing a forum engine, I advise you to determine the following points for yourself:

1. What kind of forum functionality do you need? Most forum engines are very powerful, but some of the nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend visiting the official sites of the engines and familiarizing yourself with the detailed description of the functionality.

2. Paid or free engine - this point must also be taken into account. In this review, there are only two paid engines - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. Community development - when the engine has a developed community both in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet, this is a big plus. The development of the community is directly related to the number of different modifications, improvements and design patterns. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many issues will have to be solved on their own.

4. Date of the last engine update - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers are not developing it or have abandoned further development. This is a big disadvantage. Internet technologies are constantly evolving, and a forum with outdated functionality will limit the possibilities for its further development.

Okay, enough big words 🙂. I'll start with the most popular forum engines based on this CMS ranking.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I keep my forum Planet Photoshop on this engine. The reason is not only that it is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in the Russian Internet, therefore, a lot of mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with which you can further expand the functionality.

Logs of actions of the user, moderator, administrator, precise settings of the access rights of the moderator and administrator, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and private messages - these are just a part of phpBB's functionality.

I also really like the direction in which phpBB is evolving from version to version. phpBB is convenient for both administrator and moderators and regular users.

My opinion for several years of using phpBB is that it is a wonderful forum engine that is not demanding on hosting resources, and provides all the necessary potential for running a forum.

Useful phpBB resources:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in runet. Many well-known forums work on it. Has developed communities in the English-speaking and Russian-speaking Internet.

There are additional official applications for IPB (gallery, blog, file archive module). In addition, there is a visual message editor, a text version of the forum, optimized for search robots, a tool for convenient backup of the forum database, a detailed log of actions of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of actions of search robots.

Useful Invision Power Board Sites:

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vBulletin is a great forum engine. It is paid, you can find out the cost. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.

Support for podcasting, automatic generation of forum RSS feed, the ability for visitors to create social groups and clubs of interest on the forum, galleries of user photos, tags are supported, the ability to add forum topics to social bookmarks by users themselves - these are the most interesting features of vBulletin, in my opinion.

punBB is a very light and simple forum. The forum control panel is user-friendly and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is compensated by the speed of its work and undemanding hosting resources.

PunBB developers focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful punBB resources:

YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB does not use a database to store data, but files.

A convenient text editor for writing messages, ample opportunities for administrators and moderators, the ability to change settings and templates "on the fly", the ability to convert a page to a "printable version" - these are not all the features of the YaBB forum engine.

Now a little digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that give a good effect for increasing targeted traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed 10 profitable young sites from different topics as an example, how they are being promoted and described how it can be used to promote their resources.

SMF is another fast and lightweight forum engine. It is undemanding to server resources and is actively gaining popularity.

OpenID support, a user alert system, the ability to premode topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that's not all SMF allows!

Intellect Board is an original free engine. The idea of the Intellect Board developers is the idea to create a site based on the forum. Intellect Board functionality is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, file archive, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. In fact, Intellect Board is a full-fledged content management system.

Main features of Intellect Board - Ability to set rules for all sections, support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating reduced copies of pictures and photos, the ability to issue warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (and warnings can be both unlimited and limited in time), rating topics, articles, files and photos /

ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board)

ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It also, like YaBB, does not require a database and stores information in text files.

ExBB has the following advantages: pages are generated very quickly, the load on the server is minimal, a high degree of resistance to hacking, the forum works on files, no databases are required, for its work it is enough to have php support on the hosting.

Vanilla is an original forum engine that is interesting for its modularity. A big plus of this forum CMS is that most of the modules are installed in one click.

Pros of Vanilla: its own framework that allows you to write extensions, the ability to build communities (voting, tag clouds, blogs, chat, karma-like add-ons, etc.), ease of installation of add-ons (in most cases, uploaded, pressed one button - and that's it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to additions, of which about 450 have been written now.

Another interesting feature of the Vanilla forum engine is the "Whisper" system - you can simply whisper a message to someone without leaving the topic page or create a "whisper" topic that will be a visual history of the correspondence.

Let's start right away with the main script code:

#! / usr / bin / perl

# which-forum.pl script
# (c) 2010 Alexandr A Alexeev, http: // site /

use strict;

# commented lines - for strictness
# if the task is to collect engine statistics, leave it as it is
# if you make a list of forums - uncomment

my $ data;
$ data. = $ _ while (<> ) ;

# check how much Powered by phpBB was without link in footer
print "phpbb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? phpbb \ .com \ /? "[^>] *> phpBB / i or
# $ data = ~ /viewforum\.php\?"^""")*f=\d+/i or
$ data = ~ / phpBB \ -SEO / i or
$ data = ~ /) ;
print "ipb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? invision (?: board | power) \. com \ /? [^ "] *" [^>] *> [^<]*IP\.Board/i or
$ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? invisionboard \ .com \ /? "[^>] *> Invision Power Board / i or
$ data = ~ /

/ i or
$ data = ~ /index\.php\?†^""†*showforum=\d+/i) ;
print "vbulletin \ n "
if ($ data = ~ / Powered by:? [^<]+vBulletin[^<]+(?:Version)?/i or
$ data = ~ /) ;
print "smf \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? simplemachines \ .org \ /? "[^>] *> Powered by SMF / i or
$ data = ~ /index\.php\?†^"""*board=\d+\.0/i) ;
print "punbb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (? :( ?: www \.)? punbb \ .org | punbb \ .informer \ .com) \ /? "[^>] *> PunBB / i); #or
# $ data = ~ /viewforum\.php\?†^"""*id=\d+/i);
print "fluxbb \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /viewtopic\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.) fluxbb \ .org \ /?" [^>] *> FluxBB / i) ;
print "exbb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? exbb \ .org \ /? "[^>] *> ExBB / i); # or
# $ data = ~ /forums\.php\?†^"""*forum=\d+/i);
print "yabb \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? yabbforum \ .com \ /? "[^>] *> YaBB / i or
$ data = ~ /YaBB\.pl\?†^"""**num=\d+/i);
print "dleforum \ n "
if ($ data = ~ / \ (Powered By DLE Forum \)<\/title>/ i or
$ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] + (?: http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? dle \ -files \ .ru | act = copyright) [^ "] *"> DLE Forum<\/a>/ i) ;
print "ikonboard \ n "
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "[^"] * http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? ikonboard \ .com \ /? [^ "] *" [^>] *> Ikonboard / i or
$ data = ~ /\ n "
if ($ data = ~ /\ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /forums\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
# $ data = ~ /topic\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? flashbb \ .net \ /?" [^>] *> FlashBB / i) ;
print "stokesit \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /forum\.php\?f=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? stokesit \ .com \ .au \ /?" [^>] *> [^ \ /] * Stokes IT / i) ;
print "podium \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /topic\.php\?t=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = [""]? http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? sopebox \ .com \ /? [""]? [^>] *> Podium / i) ;
print "usebb \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /forum\.php\?id=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? usebb \ .net \ /?" [^>] *> UseBB / i) ;
print "wrforum \ n "
# if ($ data = ~ /index\.php\?fid=\d+/i or
if ($ data = ~ /] + href = "http: \ / \ / (?: www \.)? wr \ -script \ .ru \ /?" [^>] *> WR \ -Forum / i) ;
print "yetanotherforumnet \ n "
if ($ data = ~ / Yet Another Forum \ .net / i or
$ data = ~ /default\.aspx\?g=posts&t=\d+/i) ;

You will find this and other scripts mentioned in the post in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the code of the html page for the presence of forum engine signatures in it. We used a similar technique when defining WordPress and Joomla, but there are a couple of differences. First, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows you to load the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several analyzers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script, the presence of a signature is 100% a sign of the engine. Last time the presence of the signature only gave weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the highest weight "won". I decided that in this case, this approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

To test how the script works, I did a little research. I made a list of several thousand forums and ran each of them through my script, thereby determining the percentage of program triggers and the popularity of various engines.

I used my google parser to get a list of forums. The search engine sent requests like

site: forum. *. ru
site: talk. *. ru
site: board. *. ru
site: smf. *. ru
site: phpbb. *. ru
....

etc. The complete code of the query generator can be found in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl... In addition to zone.ru ,.su .ua .kz and.by were also used. It was difficult to do this research last time because WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in their URLs. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What are 600 Drupal Sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment upset me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, only 7083 were successfully identified with the engine, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I missed some engine? Was Bitrix really on half of the forums? Or should I spend more time looking for signatures? In general, more research is required here.

Among 56% of successfully identified engines, the most popular, as expected, were IPB (31%), phpBB (26.6%) and vBulletin (26.5%)

They are closely followed by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I would not recommend strongly trusting these figures (they say, every third forum in RuNet works on IPB), but, of course, it is possible to draw certain conclusions.

For example, if you intend to create a website on a forum engine and plan to modify the forum, say, pay users $ 0.01 for each message with automatic withdrawal of funds once a week, then you should choose one of the three most popular engines. The more popular the forum, the more likely it is to find a programmer who is well versed in it.

If significant changes in the engine are not expected, then it may make sense to choose not the most popular engine, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of automatically sent spam on it.

Scripts for searching / defining forums can also be found in more than one practical application. The first thing that came to my mind personally was to sort the identified forums by TCI and place posts on the first hundred with links to one of their sites. However, a hundred forum dofolllow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are interested in transitions.

It is clear that the named use of scripts is far from the only one. I think you can easily figure out how else you can use them.

In case someone doesn't know, Simple Machines Forum - SMF for short - is, as the official website says, a free, professional-grade package that will allow you to organize your own online community in a few minutes. on this engine, you can see it here. I myself put my forum on it (by the way, go to FreeForum.biz).

It doesn't matter if a lot or a little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you are wasting your precious time on moderation. Setting up a plugin that will do all the work for you takes a few minutes, and it will save you a total of days and months, which will add up from the minutes you would spend erasing messages and deleting users.

I will notice that I tried to fight spammers on my own - I blocked access by IP and even by subnets. It really worked, eliminated a lot of garbage, but, nevertheless, once every one or two days, someone made their way. And quite a lot of time was spent on replenishing the database of banned IPs. I thought there must be a more convenient way, and it really was found!

1. Installing and configuring Stop Spammer

In two weeks of operation, this plugin blocked 2202 fake users. Each of them would leave at least one message. Spammers are not going to slow down and every day I would spend time cleaning up my forum.

Instead, every few days I go to the user management page and see something like this:

I turn to the section "Awaiting approval" (these are the found spammers who are deprived of the opportunity to leave messages until their accounts are approved by the administrator). I put a checkmark "Select all" and delete them with one click:

That's all, all spam accounts are sent into oblivion. Back to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? Select all of them and send them with one button for verification:

One "red" appeared, we immediately delete it. If you have free time, you can do others. If there is no time, then do nothing with new users - most of them will "blush" during subsequent checks. If you have time, you can go to their profiles and see - if there is a link in the signature - immediately banned, these are fake accounts of spammers who will never leave a single useful message.

I told you how to use this magic plugin, now I will tell you how to install it.

Download two files: language_full.zip (this is the language pack for translating the plugin) and StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip (the number may be different, since the versions are updated). Unpack the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive into some folder. Unpack the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now zip our folder.

In the admin panel, proceed to installing packages. Opposite the "Download Package" label there is a button for selecting a file on your computer. Select our new archive (where we replaced the language file), upload it to the forum and activate the package.

You're done!

Additional configuration of the plugin takes place in the admin panel: go to

Users → Registration → Setting

You can leave the default values there. There is also a field called "Your API Key". Without this key, you will not be able to report new spammers (but the plugin will work and filter known spammers). If you want to get your own API key, go to www.stopforumspam.com to register, and then enter the key here. If you have not received the key yet, please leave the field blank. Then the default key will be used.

2. Installing and configuring Anti-Spam Links

The adherents of the SEO religion (you can see more about my attitude towards SEO-nists in another) have a firm conviction that by increasing the number of links to their site, they "promote" it (for some reason, the idea of creating interesting and high-quality content for none of it never occurs to them). There would be a sucker, but there would be ways to get money out of him. So, some "citizens" provide services for "running" sites on forums. They create a large number of accounts on different forums and insert backlinks there in signatures and in other available fields. Despite the fact that even "seo-experimenters" have already empirically proven that there is no sense from these links, some warn that for this you can get a ban from search engines, Yandex, for example, simply ignores links on ALL forums and sites where anyone can leave links. Google also has similar algorithms - ignoring links in comments, etc. But the law is not written for suckers ... Therefore, we, the owners of forums, have to reckon with the facts that “cool SEO-optimizers” order a “run” of their shitty things for a thousand rubles.

The Stop Spammer plugin will filter out a lot. But we can help him! You can knock out the interest of spammers to post links on your forum. This is what Anti-Spam Links is for. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does so:

those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
those who, for example, have less than 15 messages, cannot leave active links, http: // is removed from the links and in general these links become nubolinks (newbielink)
those with, for example, less than 50 posts can leave active links, but all links receive the nofollow attribute.
well, those with more than 50 posts can insert the most common active links that transfer the site's weight to the page they link to.

Believe me, would-be SEOs are very attentive to the form in which their link gets to the site. They'll lose interest in your forum very quickly if they can't easily post their shit-links to their shit-sites there.

Yes, by the way, the above rules also work in fields such as signatures.

To install this plugin, go to its official page. Download the anti_spam_links_v1.0.1.zip archive (the number may be different). Again, in the forum admin panel, go to the installation of packages (as was done with the previous package) and install it. There is no language file for this package, so you don't need to unpack the archive or do anything with it.

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Configuration → Configuring Mods ... → Configuring Mods

If you wish, put down how many messages a user should have to upgrade their capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins will make your life VERY easy for you, the forum owner, and will save you a lot of time. Nevertheless, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, it is necessary to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. So don't throw your web resources away!

Let "s not forget good old forum software. Geeks use them for tech support. Businesses use them for collaboration. Here" s our take on 70+ forum engines, hosts, and tools.

Forum Engines (Free Software)

Pocoo - Never heard of a Python-powered board? Neither did I, until I found Pocoo. It "s WSGI compatible, and has an advanced plugin system.

PunBB - With XHTML-compliant pages, simplicity, and speed, what "s not to like?

Quicksilver Forums (QSF) - Based on the now dead MercuryBoard, QSF has grown into a mature engine sporting features such as 3D permissions or skinning.

RForum - Strong forum with mailing list integration, powered by Ruby.

Simple Machines Forum (SMF) - Originally a fork of YaBB SE, SMF features WYSIWYG, powerful groups, and much more. Note: there is some dispute about whether SMF is free software or not, since you are not allowed to redistribute the forum / software itself without written permission.

Snitz - Basic ASP forum.

Tiny forum that stores its information in TXT files instead of a database.

Unclassified NewsBoard Forum (UNB) - Easy to use forum engine with Jabber notification.

UseBB - Lightweight, clear, and efficient board package.

Vanilla - Terrific AJAXified forum with a really nice look you won "t find anywhere else.

Vikingboard - Minimalistic board engine for high performance.

Viscacha - Board with integrated CMS and conversion from CuteCast, Vision Board, phpBB, and WBB.

YaBB - Easy to install and easy to use, YaBB is more than yet another bulletin board.

Yazd - Basic forum engine under the Apache license.

Forum Engines (Commercial)

AspNetForum - Clean and powerful ASP.NET forum engine. $ 85- $ 169.

Burning Board - Easy to set up board that will import existing Invision Power Board, MyBB, phpBB, PunBB, Simple Machines Forum, or vBulletin forums. $ 139.99- $ 269.99.

FuseTalk - Powerful forum software used by big-names such as Adobe, Boeing, NASA, NBC, US Airforce, McAfee and Lonely Planet. But the names will cost you. $ 649- $ 4599.

FusionBB - Calendar, photo gallery, PayPal, article templates, and much more are available with this great piece of software. $ 425 flat fee or $ 149 flat fee and $ 39 / year.

Ideal BB - ASP / COM board with a nice revision feature. $ 299- $ 2099.

Invision Power Board (IPB) - One of the most popular commercial boards of all time. $ 149.99- $ 299.99.

Jive Forums - Powerful board used by companies such as EA and ESPN. Unfortunately, very expensive. $ 14,950 flat fee, $ 1950/1000 users, $ 4950/5000 users, or $ 9950 / 20,000 users.

MyProBB - Powerful anti-spam features makes this one a keeper. It "s cheap, too. $ 25 / year.

UBB.threads - $ 725 flat fee or $ 229 flat fee and $ 125 / year.

vBulletin - Extremely popular board with tons of features. $ 160 flat fee or $ 85 / year.

WowBB - WYSIWYG, internationalization, and much more available with this PHP board. $ 99 flat fee or $ 55 / year.

Forum Hosts

Blursoft MetaForum - Has a ton of AJAX features, but manages to stay search friendly. And yes, the back button does work. Free.

Conforums - Unlimited categories, boards, and posts with HTML and JavaScript customization. Free.

CuteCast - Basic forum hosting. Free.

GoBoardz - Nice forum with photo sharing and a nice interface. Free.

Hyperboards - A big hosting provider with global login (one Hyperboards account logs you into every Hyperboards forum), skins, pages, and unlimited posts and boards. Free.

Invision Power Board (IPB) - One of the most popular commercial boards of all time. $ 10- $ 75 / month.

ProBoards - A well known host powered by YaBB. Free.

Sudden Launch - Forum host with unlimited posts, replies, and boards. Free.

WowBB - WYSIWYG, internationalization, and much more available with this PHP board. $ 99 flat fee and $ 3.95 / month or $ 7.95 / month.