Invision Power Board

Perhaps one of the best bulletin board (aka forum) packages available is Invision Power Service’s Invision Power Board (now officially called IP.Board). It has many powerful features and a growing community of users and developers.

IPB’s newly updated administration panel provides about half of the board’s power. The interface is somewhat logically laid out, with big top navbar buttons for managing the categories, users and other content related features; the look and feel of the forum; settings; and third party extensions. There is somewhat useful help within the interface for quick reference, and the latest version’s color scheme looks pretty. I have two main complaints about the Admin CP, however. Within the Components section, the list all of the modifications installed and their respective management pages are in a rather long sidebar on the left, slowing down access to options located further down when many components are installed. Also, the permissions system isn’t very fine grained, giving you very few permissions to work with for each user group and forum category (in comparison, Simple Machines Forum has about two dozen permissions just for a category).

When it comes to front-end options, IPB has it all. The Personal Message system works pretty well, the topic controls are unparalleled, and post authoring is very intuitive. My favorite feature in IPB is the announcements, which will place a topic-styled post in a separate area above topic listings (screenshots below). The post notification system leaves something to be desired, however, since every email sent by it has the same title. This causes every single post’s notification to be grouped into one thread when viewed in Gmail. After a while of just archiving the messages, you will have many messages stacked up in the conversation, and you’ll soon discover the usefulness of Gmail’s relatively new Delete button.

Overall, I would highly recommend IPB as an excellent commercial product (the price tag at press time is $149.99 for the standard edition, $299.99 for the Business license), but for the beginner to online communities, Simple Machines Forum is a more cost-effective alternative.