Best way to create a forum for free

Who gave me some karma? I gave mine all away and had zero on 10/27 and now, 11/3, I see that I have 63. Somebody was nice. Anyway, I like this website, although its grown a little too big for me. I want to start my own forum for the town in the US that i’m living in now. We need it to discuss such weighty issues as whether we should have a liquor store in town, whether new athletic fields are really needed, and how to save open space, etc. Boring stuff, but decisions on these issues have an impact on quality of life. Anyway, I don’t want to have to pay for anything if possible. Before I had a China forum on delphiforums.com, but I hadn’t been to it in a long time and it seems it disappeared. Also, it seems that those forums are no longer free. If you have any experience with free forums, please post!!!

I think the one Gus uses here is free… www.phpbb.com

There are a couple of others that looked pretty good when I was looking, until I got overwhelmed. Ikonboard and I think Phorum (used at www.community.com.tw)

A really simple one that has banners but not too bad is www.worldcrossing.com

J.

I like DiscusWare, http://www.discusware.com/discus/index.php
Not so many bells and whistles but simple with good functionality

If you knew who gave it to you (wink,wink) it would defeat the purpose.
:smiley:

free hosting

spaceports.com - offers free webhosting including php and mysql
tripod.lycos.co.uk - offers free webhosting including php and mysql
multimania.com - french host, offers php and mysql

Read this, too: phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t= … ght=tripod

And this: members.lycos.co.uk/TCEInHeaven/ … c.php?t=19

Good luck

Thanx to everyone that gave me advice. :smiley: Gus, I tried spaceports.com- I put in the name I wanted for the forum and my email address. The message that popped up was that they would send me more info (password, I think) via email within the hour. I haven’t received anything. Any thoughts? What is your number one choice for the easiest setup/free forum? Also, is segue using spaceports?

I used spaceports for other projects in the past. from the connections I used back then (dial up in Taiwan), I found managing the website (loading files, setting up scripts) to be very slow – too slow for my purposes.

I found phpBB to be easier than the Ubb to install. But let me add:

  1. I knew very little about PHP and MySQL (actually, I still don’t know very much :shock:)

  2. Your systems administrator needs to tell you a few of things about your MySQl access (hostname, login, password) and then phpBB sets up, well, practically by itself! Those three things are ALL you need to know! Scary.

  3. Your decision to go with phhBB over Ubb will probably be more for speed and performance. It’s faster to run, and it doesn’t “weigh down” your server as much as the Ubb. This second point will probably not be meaningful to most of us, but if you are on a free or cheap service, they’ll probably complain after some point about the “number of processes forked becuase of you your Ubb” – whatever that’s supposed to mean :wink: In short, the Web Host would like you to use phpBB for their sake

Discus is completely free – and I kind of recall it was pretty easy to set up. However, I didn’t like the layout – although some websites (like www.tsinoy.com) have it set up quite nicely. The cool thing I found about Discus was that you could easily “e-mail-your-posts” - -so for sometime, the discus installation I did was the private forum Christine Hsu and I used to talk about administrative issues on O-dot-ORG

Invisiboard looks A LOT like phpBB – and it’s also free and php- and mysql-based. Perhaps their installation process is even easier – if it’s possible.

Hope this helps,

This is a discus that looks like phpbb – forum.hkwriterscircle.com/cgi-bi … discus.cgi

Recently, I was PMed:

[quote]1. If I have my site at spaceport.com for instance. What softwares I need to download and how to install them?

  1. What kind of administrative works I have to perform. [/quote]
    Useful software

I have not been to SpacePorts for some time. You’ll only need your basic website building tools:

a trust text editor (my favorite: textpad.com/download)
a versatile FTP client (I like leapware.com/download.html)

For SpacePorts, you shouldn’t need anything special

Administration of the forum?

Now THIS is a big question – one that we are all still trying to answer :wink:

After you’ve set up phpBB, first thing you do is go to the Configuration setup. After this is done, everything else is, well, a question of style

Btw, this might help – my favorite phpBB resources for modifications and help:

phpbb.com
phpbbhacks.com

If you come across something there that you would like implemented in Segue Taiwan, copy the URL and paste it in our Feedback and Announcement forums

hth :slight_smile: