I looked around for the right forum for this blog. I looked at around five different ones; I read about them in detail or tested them out based on user experience, loading speed, and SEO friendly ability, and I have came up with the following.

Invision Board
Premium Board with a lot of features and very secure. However, it’s very bulky and there is just too many things on the forums that will make blog readers hate it. Since it’s premium, I have to pay $199 per year I think.

vBulletin Forum
It’s nice and quick loading and the best part about this forum is that it’s SEO friendly. It’s one of the most popular premium boards that are used on various numbers of sites on the web. Since it’s premium, the lifetime licensing fee is $160. Again, it’s not free so it was crossed out from my list of choices.

phpBB
This is the most popular forum on the web. It’s quick loading and it’s very user friendly. Unfortunately, adding a mod to it is very hard; if I wereto appl ya mod then I have to go through the php code and add extra codes from the mod. Also, a lot of forum users have complained about the coding errors for phpBB. I worked with phpBB before and it gave me so many problems, the reason I used phpBB was due to the automatic installation of the forum from cPanel’s Fantastico.

Simple Machines Forum
This is a fast loading nice forum. However, it looks the same as any traditional forum. It’s bulky and it looks the same as Invision Board. It was one of my choices for this blog’s forum.

Vanilla
A new open source blogger friendly forum. Puneet suggested this forum so I took it in consideration. Since it’s new, there isn’t many add-ons for it. However, this forum is simple, very slick, and it loads very fast. This was also one of my choices for this blog’s forum.

At the end of the day I chose Vanilla to be installed for this blog. I’m currently working on the forum and it should be released soon. If you have any suggestions what so ever then please just submit them on the comment box below.


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