Review of forum CMS. Automatic detection of the forum engine of the month board powered by smf

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

Script which-forum.pl examines the HTML page code to see if it contains signatures of the forum engine. 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 you to download 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 a signature only added weight to the corresponding engine and the engine with the greatest weight “won”. I decided that in this case, such an approach would only unnecessarily complicate the code.

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

To get the list of forums, I used my Google parser. Queries like this were sent to the search engine

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

and so on. You will find the complete query generator code in the file gen-forumsearch-urls.pl. In addition to zone.ru, .su .ua .kz and .by were also used. Last time, it was difficult to conduct such a study, 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 Drupal sites?

I must admit, the results of the experiment disappointed me. Of the 12,590 sites studied, the engine was successfully identified on only 7,083, that is, only in 56% of cases. Maybe I didn't take into account some engine? Was it really true that half of the forums had Bitrix installed? Or should I have spent more time searching for signatures? In general, additional research is required here.

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

They are followed with a large lag by SMF (5.8%) and DLEForum (5.3%). My favorite punBB was only in 6th place (1.64%). I wouldn’t recommend putting much faith in these numbers (they say that every third forum on the RuNet runs 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 greater the chances of finding 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, for example SMF or punBB. This will reduce the number of hacker attacks on your forum and the amount of spam automatically sent on it.

Scripts for searching/identifying forums can also find many practical applications. The first thing that came to my mind was to sort the identified forums by TIC and post on the first hundred posts with links to one of my sites. However, hundreds of forum dofollow links did not affect the TCI in any way (2 updates have passed), so it is better not to waste time here, unless you are not interested in transitions.

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

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 between visitors. A forum is a great way to organize a community on your site and build a regular 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 the following points for yourself:

1. What forum functionality do you need? Most forum engines have extensive capabilities, but some nuances are not implemented in all forum CMSs. I recommend visiting the official websites of the engines and reading detailed descriptions of the functionality.

2. Paid or free engine - this point also needs to be taken into account. There are only two paid engines in this review - vBulletin and IPB, the rest are free.

3. Community development - when an engine has a developed community both on 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 templates. If the engine has a small community, then you need to keep in mind that many issues will have to be resolved on your own.

4. Date of the last update of the engine - 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 rating.

This is my favorite forum engine, and I run my Planet Photoshop forum 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 on the English-speaking Internet and on the RuNet, therefore many mods have been developed for phpBB for every taste, with the help of which you can expand the functionality even further.

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

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

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

Useful resources for phpBB:

Invision Power Board is a paid forum engine that is very popular on the Internet. You can find out the cost in RuNet. Many famous forums operate on it. It has developed communities on the English- and Russian-language 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 search robot actions.

Useful sites for Invision Power Board:

vBulletin is a wonderful forum engine. It is paid, the cost can be found out. Along with IPB, vBulletin is the leader among paid engines.

Podcasting support, automatic generation of forum RSS feeds, the ability for visitors to create 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 compensated by its speed and low requirements for hosting resources.

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

Useful resources on punBB:

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

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 into a “printable version” - these are not all the capabilities of the YaBB forum engine.

Now a small digression. If you are interested in learning about those promotion methods that give a good effect for increasing target traffic, then I can offer my paid research SEO intelligence http://seorazvedka.ru/, in which I showed, using the example of 10 profitable young sites from different topics, how they are promoted 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, a 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 behind the Intellect Board developers is to create a website based on a forum. The functionality of Intellect Board is very wide - a collection of articles, presentation, news, archive of files, photo gallery, IRC chat, encyclopedia. In essence, Intellect Board is a full-fledged website management system.

The main features of the Intellect Board - The ability to set rules for all sections, support for graphic libraries GD and GD2 for creating small copies of pictures and photographs, the ability to issue warnings and rewards by moderators and administrators (and warnings can be either indefinite or time-limited), rating topics, articles, files and photos/

ExBB (Exclusive Bulletin Board))

ExBB is a lightweight and free forum engine. It, 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 runs on files, no databases are required, for it to work 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 is that most modules can be 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, upload it, press one button - and that’s it!), extensibility of standard functionality (modularity) due to add-ons, of which about 450 have now been written.

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