What kind of forum and blog software do you prefer?

[Jayson]

Do you prefer free, paid or a mix of solutions? What do you feel are the pros and cons of paid and free solutions?

Well, in my opinion, the updates for paid software can be annoying. I mean, XenForo demands around $60 for yearly renewals. However, though, the upside is that you can probably miss one or two years worth of renewals and still have decent software. On the other hand, though, it seems like ancient versions of XenForo have trouble working with hosting nowadays. Well, anyway, people might want upgrades to prevent hacking, but I think that fear is overrated. Well, all you need is strong passwords. I mean, a password of 123 is just asking for it .

 

[PGen98]

I've always preferred paid software for forums over free, and I've used just about every forum platform out there and still come back to XF for my needs. It's not just the quality of the product or the security features, it's the fact that they are a full-time, compensated owners and developers of the software, so they are there quickly to respond to any bugs or security patches needing to be fixed and released. That's a level of assurance you don't get from freeware where the devs are working in their spare time and patches come when the developers can get to them. Also I just find the standard of coding to be a bit higher on paid software than freeware, though that's not to say freeware is made poorly or lacks standards, it's still a quality product most of the time!

 

[Leonard]

Do you prefer free, paid or a mix of solutions? What do you feel are the pros and cons of paid and free solutions?

Well, in my opinion, the updates for paid software can be annoying. I mean, XenForo demands around $60 for yearly renewals. However, though, the upside is that you can probably miss one or two years worth of renewals and still have decent software. On the other hand, though, it seems like ancient versions of XenForo have trouble working with hosting nowadays. Well, anyway, people might want upgrades to prevent hacking, but I think that fear is overrated. Well, all you need is strong passwords. I mean, a password of 123 is just asking for it .

Great advice, ???

 

[Jayson]

I've always preferred paid software for forums over free, and I've used just about every forum platform out there and still come back to XF for my needs. It's not just the quality of the product or the security features, it's the fact that they are a full-time, compensated owners and developers of the software, so they are there quickly to respond to any bugs or security patches needing to be fixed and released. That's a level of assurance you don't get from freeware where the devs are working in their spare time and patches come when the developers can get to them. Also I just find the standard of coding to be a bit higher on paid software than freeware, though that's not to say freeware is made poorly or lacks standards, it's still a quality product most of the time!

The threat of bugs and security packages is overrated. I mean, if people have passwords of "123" what do they expect?

 

[PGen98]

The threat of bugs and security packages is overrated. I mean, if people have passwords of "123" what do they expect?

...having a terrible password does not equate to bugs or security exploits. That more ranges in the category of outright stupidity. I'm talking cross-site scripting vulnerabilities, genuine bugs in the platform that can break functionality, i/o exploits, and so on...bad passwords are a result of user error, not the software, and as such happen on any platform.

 

[nomad]

Well, I don't have forums and I have never used forum software. Therefore, I do not know what's it like to use paid or free forum softare. However, I have a website built on wordpress. Wordpress is free to use. I also use free theme and free plugins. I have never spend any money on creating my website except paying for domain and hosting of course.

 

[Games]

I prefer free software.
I built my website based on WordPress and I really like it!

 

[Alexandoy]

My blog is in Blogger because that is free. But now I am thinking of transporting my blogs to another platform. The suggestion is Wordpress but I am not comfortable with it because sometimes I have difficulty in remembering the functions. Much more, the creative aspect is not really that functional for me.