Hi, I'm one of the guys behind Lefora forums (we're a small team in san francisco).
gazzie, i'm curious to learn more why you don't like hosted solutions? We're working hard to make forum software that we think is kickass, and if people don't like our feature set, it's really helpful for us to know why (so that we can build more items).
Do you feel limited using a hosted service? We give away lots of free space and bandwidth and allow the admins to fully edit their CSS and add 3rd party widgets to the site. We also support custom domain name hosting, so you can have forum.yourwebsite.com and not have to use a Lefora domain. Are there other items you would be concerned with that we could address?
brandys, if you have any questions about Lefora, I'd be happy to answer them here, or you can email me at 'vincent -at- lefora.com'.
vBulletin is a great product, but I also think Lefora is a great product and we're working hard to listen to user feedback. We have a number of features you might not find on vbulletin, like spam prevention without captcha, automatic upgrades, an easy to use posting box for multimedia like youtube videos, rich member profiles, really great
SEO out of the box for your forum, and a simple to use admin panel.
If anybody wants to set up a test forum and list their feedback, I'd love to hear it. Another thing you get with lefora, that you don't find on other forum platforms, is the ability to talk directly to the development team and help shape the product and decide what features we'll work on next.
Thanks,
Vincent Lauria, lefora co-founder