I hope it's ok to mention some of the info I'm putting in here, but anyhow.
I found SMF entirely by accident actually.
I was a long-time VBulletin user, and never could find any software that matched their features.
I tried everything, searched everywhere, without much luck.
Things like faq-o-matic, Enterprise CRM, PHPbb, you name it, I tried it.
There are even charts posted online comparing the features of "all" the BB software.
I put "all" in quotes because they didn't know about SMF either.
Then one day i was doing searches on an entirely different topic, and saw a link to simplemachines,
and wondered what it was all about, which brought me here.
So just out of odd curiousity, why isn't SMF listed along with the rest when you go searching?
or am I just blind?
It seems very comprehensive, but is there actually a features comparison, eg vs PhpBB, VB, UBBS, etc etc?
I'm just a new member who's really happy to finally be here, and just curious about stuff..
The main reason is that SMF is much newer...
1.0 Beta 1 - September 29th, 2003
1.0 Beta 4 (first public beta) - March 10th, 2004
1.0 Final - December 29th, 2004
www.forummatrix.org is a great place to start when comparing features. The problem is, they don't have much information on how the features are implemented in each system...
A quick link for the major softwares:
http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/Invision-Power-Board+MyBB+phpBB+SMF+vBulletin
-AwwLilMaggie