imported post
I'm an owner and administrator on phpBB and SMF forums. My experience with vB is as a user and moderator.
If a forum owner chooses to pay for vB and the updates, that's his choice. All the paid support in the world doesn't make it better for the end users, though. I see that on lots of vB forums: the admins go nuts on the bling and advertising, and users are left with a bewildering display of crap.
To be fair, I've also seen some nicely designed vB forums. They just happen to the the minority.
Hands down, the best combination of admin and user experience and features, out of the box, is SMF. And that's because it's the least objectionable. No bling, no ugliness, full features for users (including full BBcode tags, and a quoting system that doesn't baffle users).
If you haven't guessed already, my main objection to vB is that most admins go nuts with the feature bloat. If Mike and John want to use vB, I hope they don't fall for that.
After all, a forum is for the users, not admin geekery. Keep it simple enough for casual users, and flexible enough for advanced users. But keep it about the users.
