What qualities should you be looking for in forum software? I imagine ease of use and nice graphics are appreciated, but if you could get into the technical stuff (without jargon please), that'd be nice.

Well, one of the things you should probably look for is the customizability of it. This would include the amount of skins available for it and the amount of mods available for it. Something else to look for is the size of the support community.

An adminpanel that is easy to work with and a software that is easy to customize and such.

//Andreas

Thanks for the insights Lucas and Andreas. Do you guys have any resources to recommend to someone intersted in starting into the forum world?

vbulletin.org is a good resource. Has lots of mods, etc. that you could check out.

Well, I myself use SMF (Simple Machines Forum). I stick to it because first of all it's free, secondly I like the features it offers, and thirdly because I already got used to the coding style so I can easily create modifications and hacks for it. Unfortunately the URL structure is pretty weird (uses semi-colons and dots) and the developpers believe that it SEF enough so they don't add the vB style URL support. There's also quite a bit of modifications available for it.

If you have the money, you might want to try vB. I've used it a few times and I must say that I am very impressed with it. It does cost though. In fact, that's pretty much the only reason why I don't use it!

Originally Posted by Bookworm-SEO

What qualities should you be looking for in forum software? I imagine ease of use and nice graphics are appreciated, but if you could get into the technical stuff (without jargon please), that'd be nice.

vBulletin is probably one of the best forum software out there...fairly easy to use and great support. Its what I use and reccommend.