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vBulletin and FUDForum have very similar functionality and are both implemented as PHP. They appear to both be very similar:

• http://www.forummatrix.org/compare/FUDforum+vBulletin
• http://www.forum-software.org/forum-comparator/fudforum-vs-vbulletin4

(The later compares an old version of FUDForum). The main differences are outlined below. More detailed comparison would require trying them both.

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FUDForum is an open-source product which is well supported with frequent releases and attention to details/quality. vBulletin is commercial (but relatively cheap). vBulletin is a "visible source" commercial product. Who exactly develops it is unclear "Our team is all over the world. Our headquarters are located in Southern California. vBulletin Solutions, Inc is a company registered in California, US and a division of Internet Brands."

I am less convinced than Imre that commercial support is necessarily better than open source, at least I think everyone could agree that the best open-source products are better than the worse commercially supported products, so comparisons should be made on a case-by-case basis.

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FUDForum does not support true WYSIWYG editing. This , although it does have a "Rich Text" editor which makes creating messages easier. Adding true WYSIWYG does not appear to be a priority for the developers, although there are some pointers to how to add this functionality yourself.

http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=162516&^{Image Removed}

Bi-directonal e-mail support

I saw no indication that vBulletin support this functionality, in fact some indication it does not:

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?300725-Mailing-List-integration^{Image Removed}

Again there are some hints that this can be added yourself:

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=151222&highlight=mailing+list^{Image Removed}

Integration with common identity stores.

FudForum has a PHP "hook" for integration with other login systems. We would need to look at this in more detail to understand how easy it is to use: http://cvs.prohost.org/index.php/Login_integration

I am not sure what integration vBulletin provides. There appears to be discussion of an LDAP plugin but it is not clear what level of support this has?

http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=231909

Ability to block external search engines

I don't really understand this one. Would being able to include a robots.txt at the root satisfy the requirement?

Messages go to database

FUDForum supports this, although it is not recommended "for performance reasons". It is unclear without testing whether there is a significant performance hit.

Importing from other systems

Perhaps there is an FudForum FUDForum-> vBulletin >vBulletin importer. On the other hand the links in this post all appear to be broken (commercial support at work?).

http://www.vbulletin.com/forum/showthread.php?151319-FUDForum-Import

There appears to be a script for vBulletin->FUDForum. Unclear if it works:

http://fudforum.org/forum/index.php?t=msg&goto=35104&

Detecting duplicate threads

FUDForum does not support this. I wonder how well it works in vBulletin?