which is the best forum script?

Which one do you recommend?
Free or paid?
I need the safest, friendliest interface, easy to manage and customize and friendly for search engines as well.

It depends on how much you are willing to spend if you do want to buy. PHPBB 3 is a very good, comfortable and user-friendly forum. but if you wish to buy a forum i would suggest vBulletin, even though i bought it and it's no that user-friendly. so i say go with PHPBB, if you don't like you can always buy the vBulletin :D

I don't like phpBB so much. I'm using mybb(which is free :D). If you want a paid forum script, vBulletin may be good.
Here my forum www.tarwateinthar.com (You will not see the words as these words are our unicode. :P)

As I've said before, I whole heartedly recommend vBulletin if you can afford it. If not I agree that PHPBB is a good software for free.

I am not an expert in this field, but i can say you can use the same script that this forum runs in. i really like it and is fast loading and easy to use and have seen such script everywhere.

if you want to get a free forum software which should also be user friendly then you should definitely go for phpBB3 but if you are willing to spend some money then you have two options,
1- Vbulletin
2- IPB

from these if you want more seo and less user friendly then go for vbulletin and if you prefer more user friendly over seo then go for ipb :)

Best paid forum software is vBulletin. Free, well I think is PHPbb.

Which one do you recommend?
Free or paid?
I need the safest, friendliest interface, easy to manage and customize and friendly for search engines as well.

I would like to suggest, ORCA, a free forum script is a open source and completely free in terms of licensing. Just try this one. You will find familiar.

Cheers..!!!1

PHPbb is he best one. It is well supoorted, looks nice and is becoming a standard.
Demo : free forums (http://www.forumotion.com)

I recommend the paid to post forums like this Freehostforum.