Choice of bulletin board

[deanjo]

Why vBulletin instead of the many FOSS solutions? Seems kind of ironic that a site that champions opensource uses a closed source solution to do so.

What next? Microsoft.com on apache? :P

[Michael]

vBulletin is used as when the Phoronix Forums were created (2006), it was (and largely still remains) the best solution available for forum/bulletin board software. The open-source alternatives have been progressing well, but vBulletin remains the best right now.

[deanjo]

vBulletin is used as when the Phoronix Forums were created (2006), it was (and largely still remains) the best solution available for forum/bulletin board software. The open-source alternatives have been progressing well, but vBulletin remains the best right now.

Could you explain how it's better? I run many forums ranging from 5,000 to 115,000 registered users. Last time I used vBulletin was circa 2004-5 and since then switched over to phpbb or punbb. Back then vBulletin only supported MySQL. Has this changed or does it still require you to run a heavy dependency server by limiting you to apache and MySQL instead of being able to use lighter alternatives?