WebGuru’s Blog about Digital Life

Currently it is very difficult to find a good ASP.NET discussion board program. Since one of my clients is using Windows hosting plan, it is not good to recommend vBulletin or PHPbb to him when he asked my suggestion on setting up a community forum.

To started, I did a little bit of researches on the following 3 asp.net forums.

1. Jitbit 的 ASPNetForum 4.5.x (free, $85 and $169 versions)
2. Austrian Active Data Online - Discussion Board 6.x ($200)
3. England Instant Forum 4.x ($119 or $199)

Only AspNETForum offers the downloads, for the others you will have to go to their web sites for the demonstrations. To be summarized, all of the three above are not too bad, and not too expensive. Especially the AspNetForum can be free if you keep its logo on your forum. And AspNetForum is very clean and simple on the layout too. But “simple” is not always good for the administrators. In AspNetForum, you can not set up different type of boards, and you could not control the configuration from the back-end control panel either. For example, you will have to edit the web.config file to set up bad words filter.

Discussion Board and Instant Forum are more sophisticated compared to AspNetForum on the back-end control panel. But I could not give them a trial on my local machines, and besides they are from overseas vendors which are not convenient for my client. So I had to look for more…

Anyhow, I found out a free Open Source forum program in ASP.NET C#.

Its name is YetAnotherForum (and its version was 1.9.1 with this post published, and please check the latest version on its own website). So I downloaded, and started to install. Although I have some minor issues with the installation (primary the SQL Database security issue), I liked it very much.

The reasons:

1. First of all, it supports Asp.Net 2.0；
2. Then it has the different types of forums, like open, moderated ect.
3. The third, it supports the themes (not only on the board level, but on the singal category as well.
4. More, it not only can be installed as a stand-alone application, but it can easily integrated into dotnetNuke as a module.

To know more about its features, please refer to its official website’s Feature List or Demo Site。Now, this forum only support SQL Express, not other ADO databases yet.