I am soooo grateful for what you have provided. I can't currently look at it right-now but will look at it when I can and give you a response. Thanks again.

All the forums I am on work the same and they use phpBB, vBulliten, MyBB and Invision (perhaps a few others).

I'm weary of commercial because most of the commercial ones aren't that good and very constricted (same with CMSs). I better be getting what I pay for and have excellent support when necessary. Yet I do need full customisations and plugins - Perhaps including some made by third-party. That's what I look for in commercial - Open-Source already has that.

I really appreciate your advice and good thought, DavidB

I could and have done before yet they're eve changing and highly time consuming. I am also currently conducting research on this, so I am doing something and not just leaving it to the daniweb community.

I would have to agree with you but it costs money and money is a thing I often don't want to spend. That is why I often reinvent the wheel and write my own forum or if I'm too lazy then I seek a free cms that is up to the standards although finding a free cms is a lengthy process as there are so many.

You truly write you won forum software?

I know you said you didn't want to spend anything, but check out Xenforo. It's by all the ex-developers of vBulletin. It's fairly new though, and just went stable earlier this year.

I'm currently toying with moving DaniWeb to a custom in-house solution. I've been coding something. ;)

So then what makes Xenforo or vBulliten the best? Why would you want to make an in-house solution, you are truly coding it yourself?

Well i would suggest you to go with VBulletin as its the best.

How so?

and the less standard ones are what you see first.....thats what makes the search even more lengthy

The big three are Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal. From the top of my head, there are b2evoltion and Habari. I was part of the Habari project (well, technically still am), yet unfortunately have little time for it :(