Simple Machines Forum Editor's Review

Simple Machine Forum, or SMF as it’s better known, is a great piece of free software that you can use to set up your own forum. It’s fairly straightforward to link your website and forum and many website building packages have SMF included.

There are lots of useful features to help you customise your forum in terms of appearance and usability. This is great for those who want to spend time getting their forum perfect, but anyone who cares more about being up and running than about appearance may be put off by this.

As with all programmes of this nature, you’ll need to protect yourself against automated spamming. SMF is helpful in this respect and enables you to block any suspect IP addresses.

Pro's: It’s reasonably easy to use and anyone with a modicum of computer know-how will be able to get a forum going in no time.

Con's: Menu navigation is more complicated than it needs to be.

Conclusion: SMF is very popular and fairly accessible in terms of download, installation and set-up. Once you’ve set up your forum you can link it to your website pretty easily. SMF lets you customise your forum so you can choose from a range of themes and decide on the layout. It’s easy to use, but in the event of any problems, there is a world-wide community of users to ask for help.