Sandbox

For the moderators and creators of this site I am wondering what drove you to use SMF as the forum rather than something like Fireboard? I am not wanting to start some battle between the users of both, but have a site I am developing that will need a forum. Fireboard seems to integrate into the joomla site well, although I am having issues on it opening up in a separate window (forum entry already posted).
This forum obviously gets absolutely hammered all day every day and just wish for some insight into the decision?

Again, I am not flaming any equivalent title, just thought that if anyone could provide feedback after extensive use it would be here

Fireboard didn't exist back then, so that's easy to explain .

At the time, the native forum (Mamboboard) had less features than forums like PHPBB, vBulletin and SMF. Some of these features were needed for a large forum like this one. Two of the reasons for choosing SMF was the relatively low resources it needs to run and there are no licensing costs attached.

Moderator Note: Moving to Sites & Infrastructure

Also, this forum doesn't link Joomla databases with SMF databases. It is a completely stand-alone install that is wrapped inside of the Joomla skin. SMF is an awesome platform, but for a smaller site Fireboard looks like a good option. Hopefully we'll see the Fireboard team add more features and give them a run for the money!

I like the work that the fellas here have done.
(Sorry to those lady's who may of helped!)

SMF has blended in quite nicely to the Joomla skin.

Overall, I prefer vBulletin as a forum for Joomla given that it is quite easy to integrate (bridge) and doesn't leave all the user management hassles laying around like some of the others available, such as SMF.

It also works well wrapped & standalone.