Thanks - for you personally, what does vBulletin have, that phpBB doesn’t please ?
I’ve tried all of the forums listed in here & I gotta say vBulletin for commercial & SMF for non-commercial.
Many thanks Sha - that info coming from someone that has tried all of these, is appreciated.
For the moment, I will go the free route, but one thing - how does SMF score over phpBB ?
I like SMF for a free forum, I haven’t tried any paid ones, as I only really play with them.
I find that SMF feels easier to use than phpBB.
And I like all the easy to install packages, including the anti-spam options.
Plenty of options, I prefer vbulletin.
Thanks all, will now either go for SMF or phpBB.
did u mean SMF isn’t free for a profit commercial project?
Yes, I think you posted in the wrong section, because Forums are mostly coded in PHP, not in HTML. Anyway, I would vote for Vanilla because it’s… different. 
Thanks Ryan, all done now.
I think many people underestimate Vanilla, it might not be the most feature-filled product but it’s tightly written, semantically accurate (valid code is rare for forums) and it’s got some beautiful underlying code. Even the paid products don’t seem to have the most elegantly written code (from what I’ve seen)
It should probably be said, phpBB has been hacked several times now. The last zero-day brought down their entire website for a few weeks. I’m not sure when this was last, I’m sure you can find it on Google but it wasn’t very long ago, maybe 6 months.
Of the very limited few free forum software that I’ve tried, Vanilla is the only one that has used OOP, I’ve not looked into Vanilla in detail so I don’t know if it also makes use of MVC.