Olympus vs. the rest

[Highway of Life]

You can't actually "buy" anything from phpBB. (besides the T-shirt)

BUT, you can certainly support the Open Source Fund Raiser (don't have the link here, look for announcement on .com)
Or support the developers individually... that, however, is only if you want to improve their work environment, e.g. New Computer, better or upgraded software, Mac Pro, in-ground swimming pool, etc..

[Rizzn.]

I can't speak for the more recent versions of SMF, but I know the early versions were coded procedurally rather than OO. The way they made SMF just generally bugged the hell out of me when trying to work with the code.

I've worked with various forum software packages, but phpBB was generally pretty easy to understand (code wise) and support has always been exceptional when I needed it. The only major problem I've ever had with phpBB2 was the annoying spam bots, but that's not exactly a problem with the forum software.

[KazLee]

I personally have used phpBB for over two years now, and free software its a good bit of kit. Ok it maybe lacking some features of the more powerfull boards (vBulletin, IPB etc..) but with phpBBHacks.com you can make your forum what you want it to be.

Most of all phpBB wins for me as its free

Good work on phpBB3 guys .

KL

[Soulz]

I think "Olympus" will be the best board system, the others are paid or don't have open source.

Keep up the good work guys.

Att.

[jonxmartini]

I just installed Jooomla and smf on my website and bridged them. Originaly i was going to wait for Phpbb3 to come out but it was taking to long. I am going to be deleting smf tonite because its crap and im just gonna wait for rc1 to come out and install it and then wait for the bridge to be made. Olympus is some of the best bb software out their and deffintly the best free software.

[murnauvsbuñuel]

i have found this compare with phpbb 2.0.x vB and invision:
[SPAM]

in my opinion phpbb 3.0 Olympus will be the best work

[Freelance]

When phpBB3 goes gold, they should make a new comparison.
where phpBB3 will come out better then the others

[gspark]

As for SMF, it's not even fair to compare them because phpBB3 blows SMF out of the water.
SMF's private messaging is crap, like the entire forum. Don't even consider SMF as phpBB3 is just so much better.

I think those who say phpbb blows SMF out of the water are either smoking crack or have never used SMf, SMF has features that blow phpbb out of the water, it's definitely simpler in comparison, the messaging system is far superior to phpbb's setup, now i'm still exporing phpbb3 it has improvements but the word is still out whether it tops SMF, from what i can tell so far although it appears to have a better administration setup, it seems to be more complicated now and I know when it gets released there are going to be a ton of people crying about it. The whole templating setup is a nightmare and the permissions system you may as well poke your eye with a needle,

i'm sure once you get use to it, it may turn out to be a nice piece of work, but simple it's not, too many unecessary code, files and addons, one thing i wish they hadn't have done is mess with the styles, an example of this, all the items that were classed with gen, genmed, gensmall are no more, template designers are going to have their work cut out for them, i almost dread going into the templates directory too many fraken files,

[Acyd Burn]

This may be because SMF does not use templates at all, but only call their php files so. phpBB3 is a professional forum software with a lot of control and power given to the admin; this means the admin needs to go through a not-so-heavy learning curve. Permissions for example may be looking way too complex for the first time, but if you get the grasp of roles and what the settings mean and how they interact you will surely love it. As for the style - i bet with our system designers love the freedom we give to them.

And i may remind everyone that bashing other forum softwares is not welcome here. Every forum software has it's pros and cons and users/admins should be free to decide what works best for them; by trying out.

[TwistedWeather]

This may be because SMF does not use templates at all, but only call their php files so. phpBB3 is a professional forum software with a lot of control and power given to the admin; this means the admin needs to go through a not-so-heavy learning curve. Permissions for example may be looking way too complex for the first time, but if you get the grasp of roles and what the settings mean and how they interact you will surely love it. As for the style - i bet with our system designers love the freedom we give to them.

And i may remind everyone that bashing other forum softwares is not welcome here. Every forum software has it's pros and cons and users/admins should be free to decide what works best for them; by trying out.

Good point about SMF. Between the two phpbb3 looks alot better then SMF. Hopefully Gold does as well.

Till this goes gold i have decided to use mybb. Pretty stable ( alot better then smf ) and has all the features this will have and then some. But i know the modders are already hard at work here so no worries about that. So for me the only 2 that matter is phpbb and Mybb.
As far as features go Mybb does have everyone beat as far as the free ones go and are almost up there with the payed guys fwiw. Need a little work on thier looks though which for me is very important. It is after all the first thing people ( Your potential members ) notice NOT the features etc. Again phpbb3 has the looks and again hopefully the new look is just as nice if not nicer.

The way i see it
Phpbb3 best looks
Mybb best and most features
smf that auto updater thingy. Anything that makes my life easier with updating forums i like.

As Acyd Burn said the best thing to do is just test them all out and see for yourself.

Oh and before i forget i love how the groups colors show up in thier colors on the forum and index pages. One of the best new features i like.