In the past few years, forums have emerged as an excellent tool for knowledge and resource-sharing in the Internet. However, there are a lot of forums out there that have never gone past the startup stage – their community didn’t grow and no new threads were made.

A growing community of members more needs and demands. To retain your members’ interest in your vBulletin forum, you have to optimize it for maximum performance. If a user visits your community and finds that it’s overloaded with graphics and has a slow loading time, you bet that he/she won’t stick around for long and most probably won’t come back.

Any kind of forum software is server-intensive, especially if the forum houses a large community. Optimizing vBulletin can be helpful for busy forums or for those hosted on a shared server. If the following are done, your forums will definitely be faster and server load would be decreased.

With the release of Joomla 1.7 the team behind the open source CMS has announced a new development lifecycle for its popular platform.

Changing your vBulletin title tag seems minor yet it plays a huge role in search-optimizing your forum. This is because major engines like Google and Yahoo look closely at a webpage’s title tag, among other considerations, to determine what that page is all about.

Remember that optimizing what your visitors are viewing can make all the difference in the world. A few changes in your HTML code can shave several seconds off your pages’ loading time. With the impatient nature of Internet users, a mere 1 to 2 seconds slower may mean hundreds of visitors that won’t give your vBulletin forum a chance.

As one of the best forum extensions for Joomla, Kunena is free and fully integrated. There are many free extensions available for Kunena, all of which help make it a more feature-rich forum extension.

One area where vBulletin falls behind is the issue of duplicate content. This is because its developers strive to make it as user-friendly as possible and, in the process, made all content accessible through various formats and links.

Millions of people are using phpBB forums. As phpBB is free and open source, everyone can have access to its code. phpBB is available under the GNU General Public License. Therefore, there is no need to seek permission from the phpBB Group to alter its code. Due to this reason, most people think that phpBB is more prone to hackers and it can be exploited easily.