We use and recommend bbPress for forums strongly.
But we recently migrated a clients’ sites from Apache-server to Nginx and among his sites there were few using vBulletin forum with permalinks configured on Apache.
Below is code snippet that handled vBulletin permalinks on Nginx nicely. If you find any particular vBulletin links broken, please let us know so we can try to debug it. This was first incident where we dealt with vBulletin so our codes might be inaccurate.
If vBulletin forum is in root-dir then, use:
location / {
rewrite /threads/.*$ /showthread.php?$args last;
rewrite /forums/.*$ /forumdisplay.php?$args last;
rewrite /members/.*$ /member.php?$args last;
rewrite /blogs/.*$ /blog.php?$args last;
rewrite /entries/.*$ /entry.php?$args last;
}
If vBulletin forum is in a sub-directory e.g. /forum then, use:
location /forum/ {
rewrite /threads/.*$ /forum/showthread.php?$args last;
rewrite /forums/.*$ /forum/forumdisplay.php?$args last;
rewrite /members/.*$ /forum/member.php?$args last;
rewrite /blogs/.*$ /forum/blog.php?$args last;
rewrite /entries/.*$ /forum/entry.php?$args last;
}
Please surround above code-snippets with other necessary config.
You can find some samples in our WordPress-Nginx tutorials series.