Incite on vBulletin

Anyone know how difficult it is to set up and maintain a vBulletin?

I've been interested in setting one up thats on my website but I'm afraid to spend the money and then find that I have no clue how to run it...

It should be fairly easy and straight forward to set up. I havent touched vBulletin, but have set up other forums before. Namely phpBB. www.phpBB.com is a free and open source one, that in my opinion has the same functionality as vBulletin, but I am a bit partial to open sourcing on stuff like this.

I use 2 vb boards and installation is as easy as clicking a few links, and maintaining is zilch unless you want to back up your DB once in the while...

That sounds like a good idea...*backs up his db*

I’d like to go with vb because it seems more widely used.
I think I’m going to give the phpbb a try though first.

Thanks for the input guys.

I dont think you can go wrong with either to be honest. vBulletin is extremely stable and I havent had any problems with phpBB either. I think Pank's skins rule though. Since phpBB is open source, the skins are all right, but definitely not as nice as Panks. (brown nose brown nose brown nose....)

Pays Marble his $20 commision fee...

They are normally pretty easy to set up, its mostly editing templates, setting accessiblity options and stuff like that, they are explained pretty well

Yeah and its all gui - just fill in the blanks, "name" "password" ... (Marble kicks his Linux box after pulling his hair out trying to compile mySQL db....)