Both phpBB and vBulleting are extremely powerful and sophisticated bulletin board software.

Each software comes with advocates and its detractors, but it tends to boil down to users personal preferences. However phpBB is free and opensource, and is favoured by the smaller forums. vbulleting is a product of Jelsoft and requires a licence but is very popular with large forum operators who require paid support.

Importantly phpBB and Vbulletin are what are known a s "Search Engine Friendly" as well as user friendly. What this tends to mean is that the dynamically generated URL's encourage spider activity. Also both phpBB and vBulletin make use of MySQL for the backend database engine, and PHP as the scripting engine.

vBulletin also has a very active Community which can help you with your support queries. phpBB also has an active community forum where the developers community are active and fix bugs in their software.

The only problem with phpBB is that it has suffered a few security issue's in the past, and this has made a target for hackers, who have used vulnerabilities to compromise the host's servers. However the security problems were rapidly put right by the phpBB development team.

However if you choose any kind of forum software, you will need to keep your forum up to date and subscribe to any security bulletins. You will also have to familiar with the procedures required to update your forum software. Always backup your forum fully before carrying out a major update (especially the MySQL database).

You can see all the features of both bulletin board software packages on their websites:

http://www.phpBB.com
http://www.vbulletin.com/

A forums, especially a targeted forum, based around a specific topic (such as a football team) can be an excellent addition for any website.

It attracts visitors to interact with the site and to return to the website frequently, thus making your website "sticky."

Also search engines like forums, as the content is dynamic and being constantly updated by the forum members (hopefully!)

However adding a forum addition to a website does not guarantee success. A new forum with no content and no members or little in the way of active discussion is like an empty night club. People are always reluctant to step onto a "dance floor" devoid of people!

Building a successful forum can be a challange. It certainly requires some time, patience, and
hard-work. Why? There are several important factors to consider so that you don't scare away
visitors.

You have to remove these factors in order to convince your members to stay, read, and then start posting and joining in the discussions.

Obviously when your forum is starting out, there are no discussions taking place. Here is our five point plan to kickstart your forum and over come this "chicken and egg" situation:

* 1. Write some good content and request feedback.
* 2. Offer "free" incentives. These can include advertising opportunities such as banners or text links on the website and in the forums.
* 3. Exchange posts with other forums, but don't spam other forums as that is bad etiquette, and unpolite to the other forum admins. You could however include your forum URL in your "sig."
* 4. Pay for posts. This pre supposes a web site budget, but a good place to find pay for posters, is at forums.digitalpoint.com, under "Buy, Sell or Trade" but get reference on your potential posters.
* 5. Talk to yourself. This is perhaps the least recommended option, and only if you have no budget to spend on your forum.