Forums Around the Realms

Has anyone noticed how popular many forums have become? They are everywhere. Any site, with server-side support, can host a forum these days. And not only that, most of the sites like the idea od using "certain forums only". Forums like openBB, phpBB, and vBulletin are extremely popular.

I know they are all great pieces of software, with tons of features and option, but doesn't anyone wanna be a little bit original?

Why not make your own forum? I find it to be a fun and challenging idea. Any comments on this?

I've made a forum before, and I'm developing a new one using XML/XSL-FO. I can't tell you a lot about it now, I'm in a hurry, but I'll explain some more later.

i think making a FORUM is a great idea if you want to learn PHP, Perl or some other scripting language. FORUM is such a application where you would have to use a lot of features of the particular language and you learn a lot.

but otherwise, making a FORUM which is competative to say vB...hm.... i think you got to work very very hard.

jd

like jdk said, writing a forum is probably one of the best tutorials you can get, and I myself have written one in perl and one in php, both with mysql base. That was long long time ago when I was just starting, but they came out no worse then first vbulletein ones (in fact way better).
Yet, the solution to forum problem is simple, yes you could write your own, but it is more convinient just to take already written and modify it to fit your needs.
Why reinvent the wheel?

I see your point. But my intention wasn't to raise a question of competitive forums. I'm thinking you need to be a pretty good if you want come up with a better forum than phpBB or vB. My point was to raise a question about forums in "private use". When you think of it, a forum doesn't necesserily need so many functionalities as vB has today. A good forum can be simple.

So in a sense I'm not talking about reinventing the wheel, just making your own version of the wheel...

Because vBulletin or phpBB do not have all the functions that are needed. For example, at gathering.tweakers.net there are some features that are not found in vBulletin. It works on Topix.
- Giving access to forums according to number of posts.
- Showing the latest active topics excluding certain forums you don't want to see(not implemented in Topix either)
- Really high performance.(about 30000 users, of which 10000 active in a week)

I'm writing a new forum myself now, using XML/XSL, because there are no forums doing this yet. I use XML for easy integration with another project a friend of mine is working on, a sort of update tracker for forums and websites. He can easily read my XML, and doesn't have to resort to 'screen scraping' the output of my forum. I can also easily change the output to another medium iso HTML, WML for example.

That's a pretty massive forum at tweakers. But even their forum follows the common guidelines for forums these days. It looks like it could, basicly, be any of the common forums softwares.

Personalized forums please my eye better, that have unique but simple features, calm and good looking outlook, easy navigation, and still capable to handle any number of discussions, moderators, and users.

Taradino: Can I view your forums from somewhere?