Few questions about forum Software

[Purple Rain]

I am trying to find out some information about forum software and how much it effects user participation and signups.

What I mean is, do you think that forum software plays a big part in whether or not people will sign up to your forum? From my own experience it seems much more likely that people will sign up to your forum if you are running vBulletin or maybe IPB, although not so much the latter.

This could be because people are more familiar with vBulletin as it is more popular, or it could just be that it is the best forum software and people prefer it for this reason.

I am about to launch a new service which involves forums and I just wanted to get peoples feedback about the types of software available and the way it effects existing members or new members.

[Autumn]

If you have an interesting niche, it won't matter what the software is. I could probably guarantee that 80% of forum users wouldn't have a clue or even care what software was used.

[Menthol]

I prefer vbulletin but it is not essential as long as the forum looks good.

[Colleen]

It's mainly webmaster types who are familiar with vBulletin, the general public, not so much. I am sure most regular people with basic computer skills are actually most familiar with seeing forums ran by the free forum software's, namely phpBB, for obvious reasons... it's free, a lot use it.

[Tauhid]

I prefer to signup to forums running vBulletin

[swastik]

Well, Big boards (many of them) run on PHPBB. It's not the software which makes a site successful, (even in terms of registrations) it's the labor put in, and the quality of content. Concentrate there, and you'll make it to the bigger league.

[Big Dan]

I prefer signing up for vBulletin forums only because I'm so used to it's interface. I used to be there being a top link in the footer and a View First Unread post link on top of the thread. I'm familiar enough to bookmark <forumroot>/search?do=getnew for forums I frequent. Adding &pp=200 to the end of a search URL to get less pagination on search results.

In lots of ways vBulletin is like an old pair of shoes, just comfortable and I know it well. I. It really gets my panties in a bunch when people remove default functionality. One forum I used to visit all the time removed the "View first unread post" from showthread and top link from the footer. It really aggravates me because I have scroll through all the posts to find where I last read from. I even mentioned it to the owner but he didn't fix it. It looks to me like he boinked the template because even search results don't take you directly to posts. As a result I rarely post I visit daily mainly to see if there's any good sales going on but don't both wasting time scrolling through.

I do sign up for boards with other types of forum software though. If there's good enough information the medium doesn't matter to me. Although I avoid phpbb 2x like the plague.