Actually I've done a detailed comparison about a year ago or so for a large board currently running IPB. We needed to decide to either update to a newer major version of IPB or to switch to something else. I've compared IPB against Xenforo, phpBB and MyBB. MyBB was quickly discarded because of lacking several must have features for our board. Xenforo proved quite expensive and it was actually quite hard to find out if it supported (either default or with plugins) what we needed.
IPB had of course a major plus because it's the current running software. Paid support is actually quite good and of course it offers what we needed. However, over the years (since late 2007) it proved to give quite some headaches to maintain. Each upgrade required very much time to make all customisations work again. There is a plugin system, but about half of the plugins simply don't work in any next version. So you wait some time before upgrading, hoping the plugin is upgraded as well or you have to switch to something else, make it yourself or drop the feature. Converting custom data is also quite a burden. They simply don't give enough attention to keep customisations working, phpBB does a way better job on this.
And last but not least, there were quite some security issues, especially in the 3.x line. Granted, issues were fixed quite fast, but I've also seen some code that makes me question the quality of the developers. I mean, in 2015 there passwords were still being hashed with the weak MD5(). They honestly thought it was a good idea to use
Code: Select all
$hash = md5( md5($salt) . md5($password) );
Seriously guys, the internet has moved on since we realized is wasn't a good idea to use a algorithm aimed at speed to hash data that's likely to be brute-forced. We knew this 10 years earlier.
This is of course just an example and yes, they've fixed this since then. But it was one of those things that made us question the quality of IPB.
So we decided to switch to phpBB. phpBB may not have 10.000 features packed in the core but it's proven very stable and secure over the past decade. Everything offered is rock solid and what's not in the core is probably available as extension or is relatively easy created as one. I'm very happy with it.
My extensions:
Simple CMS, Feed post bot, Avatar Resize, Modbreak, Magic OGP, Live topic update, Modern Quote, Quoted Where (GDPR) and Autoresponder.
Newest: FAQ manager for 3.2
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