I don't know but I just have to say it.
I swear I was totally pissed. I have been trying out different community boards and trying to figure out which will suit me the most. Initially reading through reviews of different forum softwares I chose what the majority chose - phpbb. At first the Admin Panel looked like hieroglyphics to me. There are too many damn options and too many features. Just figuring out what is what is hectic by itself. Handling each forum permission seemed like I was handling some C4. After a couple of days I gave up hope and decided it was time to move one.
Next in line came mybb and god I was quite happy with the core features and as for the themes I found quite a few to my liking. Then came the bombshell... the damn mods. The current release version is 1.6.8 and a quick glance in the mod section will say loads of mods with 1.6+ compatibility. When you actually try installing them then it seems like nothing is working. It looked like all fake mods all over the place. I finally figured out a 1.6.5 plugin might not work in 1.6.8. Thank god for their quite responsive support community I had to edit php files here and there....add these lines and delete these lines to finally make them work. I'm no programmer so believe me when I say it is not easy for us, maybe for you developers but not for us.
Then I decided to move back to phpbb with determination that I'll figure out what each and every option does. It does miss out on some features which is again available as mods. Again came the bombshell.Installing mods turned out to be much harder than mybb reading through php files running sql queries. Though there is something call automod which is an automated script sometimes it does not work.
I was hopeless by this time.
I decided to move to the third option with the thought that If this does not work out I'm quitting. Enuf already..!!
And I swear the features that SMF provides is just awesome. A quick glance at the themes directory and a couple of them are already my favourites. Installing themes couldn't have been much easirer. And all the core features are just about all I need. With all the current features I absolutely don't need anything else. I'm totally in love with the simplicity of SMF. It is definitely rich with features complete yet a minimalistic package.
Thank you SMF
[please dont consider me saying phpbb and mybb is bad, maybe for experienced developers it is suitable for ametures we need something simple and easy to use and manipulate. I appreciate all the hard work and time the developers put in creating these packages. I mean no disrespect to them]
Welcome to SMF.
Glad you like it. :)
Can't agree more with regard to the simplicity aspect.