Best forum solution?

[Bobthearch]

I’ve tested about every method of integrating a forum into WordPress websites. I’ve used plugin forums, standalone forums as separate sites, and standalone forums in iFrames.
So far it looks like Vanilla might be the best solution, the easiest and best-integrated.

So why four-stars instead of five? You can add sub-forums to forums, but you cannot group forums into true categories in the same way that mainstream forum software does. There is a Vanilla plugin to address this but the plugin is many years old, has reported bugs, and was never released as a stable version.