This and other scripts mentioned in the post can be found in this archive.

Script which-forum.pl examines the html-page code 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. Firstly, the script itself does not load the page code, but reads it from stdin or a file passed as an argument. This allows us to download the page once, for example, using wget, and then run it through several parsers, if we have more than one. Secondly, in this script, the presence of a signature is a 100% sign of the engine. Last time, the presence of the signature only gave weight to the corresponding engine and “won” the engine with the highest weight. I decided that in this case, such an approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

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

To get the list of forums, I used my Google parser. The search engine was sent queries like

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

and so on. You can find the complete query generator code in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl. In addition to the .ru zone, .su .ua .kz and .by were also used. It was difficult to conduct such a study last time, since WordPress and Joomla sites do not have such signatures in the URL. Catalogs like cmsmagazine.ru/catalogue/ do not provide a sufficient sample size. What is 600 sites on Drupal?

I must admit that the results of the experiment disappointed me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, only 7,083 engines were successfully identified, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I did not take into account some engine? Did Bitrix stand on half of the forums? Or should I have spent more time looking for signatures? In general, more research is needed here.

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

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 advise strongly trusting these figures (they say that every third forum in Runet works on IPB), but certain conclusions can, of course, be drawn.

For example, if you intend to make a site 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 no significant changes are expected in the engine, then it may make sense to choose a less popular engine, such as SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number hacker attacks to your forum and the amount of spam automatically sent on it.

Scripts for searching / defining forums can also find more than one practical use. The first thing that came to my mind personally was to sort the identified forums by TIC and place posts with links to one of their sites in the first hundred. However, a hundred forum dofollow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates have passed), so it's 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.

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 Machine 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. $14950 flat fee, $1950/1000 users, $4950/5000 users, or $9950/20000 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.

Forum Integration

bbPress and Wordpress integration - Official howto on integrating the two sister projects.

Joomla component that adds a powerful forum.

Integrating Vanilla and Wordpress - Official guide to integrating the two popular CMSs.

IpbWiki - Connects Invision Power Boards and MediaWiki.

Joomla! Vanilla - Bridge between the Joomla CMS and Vanilla.

Forum Tools

BBCodeXtra Firefox Extension - Context menu to insert BBCode or (X)HTML. freeware.

Hello Khabravchan!

More recently, I was puzzled by the idea of ​​​​creating a forum. Now creating a forum is not a lot of work for users, since there are a fairly large number of ready-made forum CMS, which greatly facilitate this task. But among their abundance, it can be very difficult to choose a really necessary CMS. Therefore, I decided to write my own review, which, at least a little, but perhaps will help the user make a choice in the direction of one or another engine.

Free engines

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

Tags: create a forum, forum cms, forum engine

This article is not subject to comments, 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 one of the community members. Until then, his username will be hidden by the alias.

Tours and holidays in Australia

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

There are many forum engines. I have long wanted to review forum engines. I will not compare them with each other - this is the topic of a separate article.

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

1. What kind of forum functionality do you need. Most forum engines have a wide range of features, but some of the nuances are not implemented in all forum CMS. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and familiarize yourself with detailed description 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. The development of the community - when the engine has a developed community in both the English and Russian 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 points will have to be solved on your own.

4. Date latest update engine - if the engine has not been updated for a long time, this indicates that the developers do not develop 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 Planet Photoshop forum on this engine. The reason is not only that this is a free forum engine, but also that it has wide functionality, has developed communities both in the English-speaking Internet and in Runet, so many mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with which you can further expand the functionality.

Logs of user, moderator, administrator actions, fine-tuning of moderator and administrator access rights, identification of search robots, creation of user groups, polls, attachments in messages and private messages - these are just some of the phpBB functionality.

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

My opinion after 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. It hosts many well-known forums. 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 the actions of administrators and moderators, as well as a log of the actions of search robots.

Useful sites on Invision Power Board:

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, ability to be created by visitors social groups and interest clubs on the forum, user photo galleries, 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 convenient and intuitive. punBB has fewer features, but this is offset by the speed of its work and undemanding hosting resources.

The developers of punBB focus on lightness, speed and compactness.

Useful punBB resources:

YaBB is a free forum engine written in Perl. Unlike most other forum engines, YaBB uses files instead of a database to store data.

Comfortable 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 into 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 the methods of promotion that give good effect to increase target traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I, using the example of 10 profitable young sites from different topics, showed how they are moving forward and described how this 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, user warning system, the ability to pre-moderate topics, messages and attachments if necessary, a WYSIWYG editor for messages - and that's not all that SMF allows!

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

The main features of the Intellect Board - The ability to set rules for all sections, support for GD and GD2 graphic libraries to create small copies of pictures and photos, the ability to issue warnings and encouragement by moderators and administrators (moreover, warnings can be either unlimited or time-limited), 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, server load is minimal, high degree resistance to hacking, the forum works on files, databases are not required, for its operation it is enough that the hosting has php support.

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

Advantages 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 installing 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 are now written.

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

In case someone doesn't know, Simple Machines Forum - SMF for short - is, as stated on the official website, 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 here. I myself put my forum on it (by the way, visit FreeForum.biz).

It doesn't matter how much or how little spam appears on your forum. The important thing is that you spend 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 that you would spend deleting messages and deleting users.

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

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 clearing 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 spammers found who are unable to leave messages until they are approved accounts administrator). I put a tick "Select all" and delete them with one click:

That's it, all spam accounts go to oblivion. Back to our list of users:

It can be seen that the list has noticeably thinned, but who are the rest? Select all and send 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" on 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 magical 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 as versions are updated). Unzip the contents of the StopSpammer_v2_3_9.zip archive to some folder. Unzip the language_full.zip archive into the same folder, agree to replace the files. Now zip our folder.

Go to the admin panel to install packages. Opposite the inscription "Download package" there is a button for selecting a file on the computer. Choose our new archive (where we replaced the language file), upload it to the forum and activate the package.

That's it!

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

Users → Registration → Settings

You can leave the default values ​​there. There is also a "Your API key" field. Without this key, you won't 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, leave the field blank. Then the default key will be used.

2. Installing and configuring Anti-Spam Links

Adepts 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 is not intended for anyone from they don't come to mind). There would be a sucker, but there are ways to get money from him. So, some "citizens" provide services for "running" sites on forums. They create a large number of accounts on different forums and paste there backlinks in signatures and other available fields. Despite the fact that even “seo-experimenters” have already proven by experience that these links are of no use, some warn that you can get banned 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 shit crafts for a thousand rubles.

The Stop Spammer plugin will filter out a lot. But we can help him! It is possible to knock out from under the feet of spammers the very interest to post links on your forum. This is exactly what is needed Anti-Spam Links. This plugin (specific numbers can be changed in the settings) does this:

• those who, for example, have less than five messages, cannot leave links at all
• those who, for example, have less than 15 posts cannot leave active links, http:// is removed from 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 site 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 will lose interest in your forum very quickly if they cannot easily post their shit links to their shit sites there.

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

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

To configure the plugin, go to the section

Config → Configure Mods… → Configure Mods

At your request, put down how many messages the user should have to upgrade their capabilities.

Conclusion

These two plugins will VERY make life easier for you, the forum owner, and save a lot of time. However, from time to time spammers break through and, at least once a week, you need to “thin out” users and delete spam messages. Therefore, do not abandon your web resources!