My view on VB. First I should say I have an smf based forum, and have handcoded huge parts of it (which is part of what appeals ) so I do have a natural preference for SMF, but..
VB is heading on a very fast downward spiral. The staff and devs there used to be great, really cared about their product. Sadly over the last 18 months many of the good ones have gone, and what is left is a bunch of devs that dont really care about the product, and are more interested in just selling it to unsuspecting mugs and then offering very little in the way of support.
VB5, despite what was described as "extensive beta testing" (the vast majority of the tester feedback was that it sucked) was released with a huge number of bugs. At least count I beleive 400 such bugs have now been fixed and patched. VB5 is a sloth, its incredibly slow, many of the best features are gone, and its horrendous to work on. Its pretty much killing the company.
Which takes us back to VB4 and VB3. Now VB3 was pretty good, plenty of functionality, VB4 was a huge improvement but both have one massive flaw. Security. In fact VB4 is so flawed from a security point of view that the last time I looked, the latest updated version of VB4 was actually OLDER than the latest updated version of VB3. (how does that work).
About a month ago, the PCGamer forum (running VB4) was hacked. As a result, future publishing who are behind PCGamer magazine, as well as the cyclingnews forums, and many many others shut down ALL of their forums for nearly three weeks while they tried to get to the root of the issues with VB.
SMF isnt without its faults. The development team at time fractures, rebuilds, theres a very long release cycle. 2.1 is only now coming on the horizon (about the time that 3.0 was planned), but the things it does have are security, and a pretty active community fixing holes, creating extensions for it, and if you have decent php knowledge and coding knowledge you can do some really good things with it.
for instance my forum
velorooms.com is built on smf and doesnt look very smf like, but if you really want a shock check out
idesign360.com which is also built entirely around smf.
