My friend wants to setup forum on his college website and he asked me for which forum software to choose from. Some of the options discussed by department are: Simplemachines, PhpBB, MyBB, and AEF. First question from my side to him was why isn’t dept going for invision board? But that’s their internal issue, so returned to the question and tried to compare these options on forummatrix site but unable to give him good suggestion on which one to choose among these.

Some of his requirements are:

- RSS/Atom so that individual threads of each department could show up in page of that department.

- Code highlighting Mod, it is needed especially for boards related to electronics and computers department.

- Abusive language filter

- SPAM control.

There are some other requirements as well, but i guess those are common in most of the forums like maintenance, upgrade and etc.

So what do you think which one is good forum out of these: Simplemachines, PhpBB, MyBB, AEF?

Stay away from phpBB, it's had too many exploits.

SMF is what DonationCoder and AsmCommunity runs, and it's pretty flexible and seems to have had less exploits than phpBB... at least I can't remember us being hacked at asmcommunity since we switched to SMF. And yes, you can integrate the geshi syntax highlighter with SMF, go talk to mouser

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
  puts("color me pretty!");
  return 0;
}

phpBB, it's had too many exploits.

phpBB 3 doesn't have too many of them. milw0rm.com lists a few for SMF, too, so what?
[/quote]Asmcommunity was hacked several times while running phpBB (albeit v2, iirc). SMF have had a few exploits, but I've seen it abused a lot less... and have had better user experience with SMF (especially the modded one DC is running ) than phpBB.