Quote Originally Posted by techgnome View Post
it's $200 a license.... used to be an annual deal... but they recently changed it and it is now a one-time purchase... I think.

-tg
My friend's subscription to VBulletin was for the 4.0 edition, which from what I remember had an unlimited length on the license.

PHPBB is a good solution as well.

Both VBulletin and PHPBB have active forum communities full of software mods and support. I have no technical reason to favor one over the other, I just have more experience with VBulletin. I'm by no means an expert, but I've played with it enough and added enough mods to figure out the template system.

Really the templates are basically HTML when you look at them, with some code hooks here and there. It's not too much different than working with PHPBB. Stick strong to the old advice "backup before changing" and you should be alright.

The only thing I've noticed is, and this may be only isolated to the things I've done, but when modifying the look and feel by hand, not using a pre-packaged mod, for some reason PHPBB seems a bit faster and easier to make simple changes, whereas I've had to play with VBulletin longer to make similar changes.

I think the $200 for a "forever" type license is worth it, because of their support and all the mods available on their forum. The mods on the free forums for it tend to be decent too, but I've noticed the mods on the vendor's forum tend to be easier to install and have less random issues. I didn't like the time-based subscriptions before.