phpBB is a popular Internet forum package written in the PHP scripting language. The name “phpBB” is an abbreviation of PHP Bulletin Board. Available under the GNU General Public License, phpBB is a free software.
phpBB was started by James Atkinson as a simple UBB-like forum for his own website on June 17, 2000. Nathan Codding and John Abela joined the development team after phpBB’s CVS repository was moved to SourceForge.net, and work on 1.0.0 began. A fully functional, pre-release version of phpBB was made available in July.

Simple Machines Forum (abbreviated as SMF) is a freeware Internet forum application. The software is written in PHP and uses a MySQL database backend, although multi-database support is being developed for version 2.0. SMF is developed by the Simple Machines development team.
SMF was created to replace the forum software YaBB SE, which at the time was gaining a bad reputation because of problems with its Perl-based ancestor software YaBB[citation needed]. At the time, YaBB was attributed to causing resource allocation problems on many systems. YaBB SE was written as a …