I"m looking for a forum as well for my website but written in PHP. Also I would prefer if it was free and already prepacked for installation. I’m on a deadline , so I can’t code it myself. Any suggestions?

phpbb

SMF - http://www.simplemachines.org

search google for IPB, it is also a very good one. u can also try vbullation

I fully agree with you VBullettine is nice but if you want to have more features you can try Invisible PHP board

Thanks for your suggestions. I will take a look at all them as well as this one called Vanilla.

PHPBB and SMF are included in most hosting packages ( Fantastico ) for free and it is easy to install them.

All due respect, but the poster asked about *compliant* forum software. phpBB is not the right answer. I’d look to punBB, which doesn’t have phpBB’s long history of security issues, is fully compliant, is lighter on its feet, and most importantly,  has an available and working Akismet plugin (running a forum without Akismet in the current spam client is craziness).

http://punbb.org

My second choice would be bbPress, from the makers of WordPress. http://bbpress.org/

How about this http://www.wwwthreads.com ???

Hi,
I recommend last version (3.0.B5) of phpBB.
PhpBB is released free of charge.

See also Requirements phpBB:
-  A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System with support for PHP
- A SQL database system, one of:  FireBird 2.0 or above, MySQL 3.23 or above, MS SQL Server 2000 or above (directly or via ODBC),Oracle, PostgreSQL 7.x or above,SQLite
-  PHP 4.3.3 or above with support for the database you intend to use.
-  zlib Compression support
-  Remote FTP support
-  XML support
-  Imagemagick support

I’ve also been testing BBpress (from the people who did Wordpress). Looks great and is easy to skin, but isn’t widely used to can’t really comment on security, errors etc.

vBulletin is good, has a great community.  Just remember which every one you get to stay on top of your updates. There is so much code in these beats that there usually a fair number of security holes.  Cheers.

Had some issues with phpbb - massive spam registrations and posts with the security human verification image enabled.
See here (around 20 spam registrations per day): http://www.datetopia.com/productboard/memberlist.php?mode=joined&order=ASC&start=4850
We had to turn on user moderation. We’re developing our own forum software.

Vbulletin for the win!

Use vBulletin if you dont mind paying for it.

I use SMF - http://www.simplemachines.org it has rss feeds,
which most forums are lacking.