Forum

For several years I used forums and wanted more functionality directly related to education and I found that in Moodle. Moodle gives you forums and other educational related tools such as quizes, journals, and the lesson modules which gives you the delivery of content that depends on the answers given to previous questions.

I suspect that the best forum software may be more featurful than the Moodle forum system, but the moodle system is specifically designed around education and is thus general preferable in teaching. I have found the moodle underlying source code easier to work with than most of the forum software I have looked at.

Erin,

You are right, Moodle forums do have far fewer controls than you have with vbulletin. If I were choosing between Moodle and vbulletin based ONLY on the discussion board features there would be no contest...vbulletin wins hands-down...as does phpBB...BUT, you have to remember...vbulletin and phpBB are only discussion boards...that's all they do (other than maybe a calendar and some other "bell and whistle" add ons)...they are not LMSs.

The discussion board is only one feature of Moodle. The reason I use the Moodle discussion forums is because I like the Moodle LMS package...overall, it's a very nice LMS...the best open source one available, in my opinion. Bottom line for me is that I'm willing to "live with" the limited capabilities of the Moodle discussion boards for the advantage of doing all my class activities in one system. It's a pain to use Moodle for part of your class activities and another program like vbulletin for discussions...I've tried it and it was more work for me and more confusion for my students. 

Now...if you don't want or need an LMS and you only need a discussion board, then, in my view, I would go with phpBB since it's open source and is just as good as vbulletin.

Steve