Hi everyone.
What I'm looking for here is a bit of a general idea of why I should choose SMF over other software. I don't mean a list of features and such here, that's easy enough to find; but basically just some facts and actual opinions from the community itself regarding Simple Machines. (And yes I know, there's plenty of info around these forums, I haven't stopped at this post. ;))
My other question is about the future of the project, the community itself seems quite stable and growing but what exactly are the chances of all of the developers suddenly packing up and disappearing over night? It's happened to me before and it would be a shame for it to happen again.
I think that your best friend in this case is google. There are many decent comparisons of forum software, and you'll find a ton of good/bad opinions on every one. Some other good indicators that I use for any software is the number of posts in a support forum that have no responses. If there are a high number of questions with no answers, sometimes that can indicate poor support, but in the case of SMF, a lot of the no-response posts are not really appropriate or sometimes subjective. There are people in here who can tell you that they've used many different forum packages and this one is better because... but if I were you I'd not fear SMF disappearing overnight, there are far too many people involved for that to happen, and you also have to take the licensing into account on that aspect.
The SMF developers would never just leave like that. If they did im sure they would find replacemrnt devs that know what they are doing.
I was one who tried all the forum softwares. (IPB, vB, phpbb3, myBB) But I choose]SMF for a few reasons
1) Speed - it was the fastest forum software out of the list
2) Customizable - There are so many mods/themes and its easy to build your own theme
3) Easy to use Admin Panel - I love the layout :D
4) Support - Fast and Efficent
5) Active Development
6) Its FREE and it has all the features you would ever need
SMF easily beats paid forum software imo.
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Compare Forum Softwares
- http://forummatrix.org
shadow has summed things up fairly well :). In my opinion we also have a more friendly community than some of our competitors :).
You may also be able to find some similar topics by looking through these boards