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Vanilla: a nice, strange forum

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tinjaw:
To the comments about its minimalistic appearance: I too immediately thought to myself that it looked like some SMF developers had read Getting Real and were fans of 37signals.

tinjaw:
HOWEVER, if vanilla (or any other forum software) manages to figure our how to support addons in a very clean and robust way, that would be a *HUGE* plus and a major step in the right direction.
-mouser (October 25, 2007, 11:32 AM)
--- End quote ---
From what I have personal experience with, WordPress is a good example to follow. Plugins for WP are pretty easy to add.

In general, any software that wants to use plugins will need to be designed with an API in mind from the beginning. I am sure you, mouser, can attest to that after adding plugins to your software.

iphigenie:
Well I need to choose and recommend a forum software for the company websites. Some of these are business community websites so they might get quite busy.

Anyway I use SMF on some of my private websites but some of my experiences in the past year (1 installation got hacked in jul 06, for example, via SMF, and that turned out expensive!) make me wary of recommending it for use. It is the one I know best though...

My experiences with some of the commercial ones are not any better, i dont want one that is spammable too much.

SO I had found vanilla as an option, their design would be simple to integrate with a content/news site... but I have the fear that it has not been tested and could have the same kind of security holes - and trust me i dont want our sites hacked into....

What is a good stable forum software which doesnt suffer too much from constant spam abuse, has simple things like tracking, avatars but not necessary bells and whistles?

tinjaw:
What is a good stable forum software which doesnt suffer too much from constant spam abuse, has simple things like tracking, avatars but not necessary bells and whistles?
-iphigenie (October 25, 2007, 11:43 AM)
--- End quote ---
I'm not sure you will be able to find a comprehensive (let alone competent) review of forum software with a focus on security. (But Google might prove me wrong.)

However, much of the spam can be overcome these days, it is just a matter of making an acceptable tradeoff. You can make a forum virtually spam free by:

1) Making the registration process require human intervention. The tradeoffs are a) that it is more difficult for humans to register, in terms of time and/or aggravation, which may keep some from joining b) a human is needed on the inside to approve registrations and then monitor those newly registered members' first few posts c) Automated means often make it more difficult for people with accessibility issues to register.

2) Require the first five or so postings by new members to be moderator approved.

3) Limit registration to people who you already "know" are customers/clients/prospects/etc via some other means. (Registration number, serial number, order number, etc.)

f0dder:
I think Vanilla could be a decent choice for a small amount of users, especially if you're dealing with not so tech-savvy ones that don't have a lot of requirements... but as I said the last time this was brought up, it's a bit too vanilla in it's vanilla configuration :)

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