Hi Will, there are a few reasons.

The biggest is I don't like the design of PHPBB or VBulletin - when you go to read a message in those boards, the whole page switches to just the view of that one message thread.

When you're done reading that thread and want to go to some other one, it is rather awkward, you normally have to navigate the whole page back to the "thread view" page.

That's an awful lot of back and forth navigation all the time. It's just not a good idea to put 2 important very frequently used things (thread list and message view) on completely separate isolated pages.

This forum software solves that problem by having different frames - when you're reading messages you have the threads list available in a frame on the left side, and then the right side frame switches to viewing the content of whatever thread you select. This combines 2 very frequently accessed pieces of information on one single page, getting rid of a ton of back and forth navigation.

Since I was planning on spending a lot of time on the forum, I really wanted to get one with a better design like this since it helps with going through and reading stuff quickly.


Another thing is like you mention, this forum tracks your read messages very well so you can really quickly go through and read just the new stuff. Some other forums don't track this and make you always have to scan down to the end of the thread, that's also a big problem.


Another big issue is that especially PHPBB is frequently targeted by spammers who launch automated attacks on any kind of PHPBB board they can find to try and flood it with spam. I'd really rather not spend much time worrying about that junk so that definitely rules out PHPBB. I'm sure there are extensions and ways you can configure it to minimize the risk but it is all a pretty big hassle.


I've been very happy with how this forum has worked, it is pretty simple and easy to use. The only thing that isn't too great is the searching capability, at some point in the future I'd like to tune that up to be a little easier.

- Michael