Starting a new forum

Hello alll,

I am thinking about starting a forum / chat room similar to forumosa but smaller. This will be for a bunch of teachers in Canada. Does anybody know what it takes to do this? Would I have to buy some sort of program? I really have no idea at all so any help would be greatly appreciated…

Cheers.
:yinyang:

[quote=“ididn’tdoit”]Hello alll,

I am thinking about starting a forum / chat room similar to forumosa but smaller. This will be for a bunch of teachers in Canada. Does anybody know what it takes to do this? Would I have to buy some sort of program? I really have no idea at all so any help would be greatly appreciated…

Cheers.
:yinyang:[/quote]

The program you want is phpBB. It’s free, and runs on Linux. Here is their home page:

phpbb.com/

The main expense is that you need a place to host it. I believe that Forumosa is being hosted on a user’s machine in his own house, but that takes a fair bit of technical skill. It’s less hassle to host with a commercial service like Dreamhost, but that does cost. Just how much it costs depends on the volume of traffic.

I’ve never run a forum myself, but I imagine it’s a bit of work. I can’t tell you too much more, but there are others on this forum who have experience at this, so hopefully one of them will give you (us) more details.

cheers,
DB

www.phpbb.com

It’s free and easy to use (some what). Also, if your host has fantastico it has auto install scripts so you don’t need to do anything. If your host doesn’t have fantastico it’s really easy to install anyway.

You also don’t need much to host a phpBB forum. There are even free hosts that it’ll work on.

Thanks,

that site seems like a good starting poing. Unfortunately I’m not quite smart enough to make any sense of it yet. I’ll go back and read it again when I have more time. If anybody can offer more advice or perhaps dumb it down a bit for me that would be great. I think I could likely host this thing through the universitys’ system, but then again, as already stated, I don’t know shit

Do I need to know how to use Linux to run a forum.

Am I in over my head , being a bit of a technical moron and hoping to do this?

No.

Your university account might not cut it. I have a forum too, it’s really easy. Here’s a quick run down of the steps you’d take to get (a phpBB one) setup.

Woah, they got all kinds new stuff there (or maybe these aren’t new and I never noticed).
phpbb.com/support/tutorials/

Anyway:

Check that wherever you plan on hosting it meets the requirements.

Installation of phpBB 2.0.11 requires the following:

* A webserver or web hosting account running on any major Operating System
* A SQL database system, one of:
      o MySQL (3.22 or higher)
      o PostgreSQL 7.0.3 or higher (preferably 7.1.x or 7.2.x)
      o MS SQL Server (7 or 2000) directly or via ODBC
      o MS Access (2000 or XP) via ODBC
* PHP (3.0.9 and above or preferably a recent 4.x) with support for the database you intend to use above

If your server or hosting account does not meet the requirements above I am afraid phpBB 2.0 is not for you.

Next, download:
phpbb.com/downloads.php

You’d want the full full zip.

After that, install it:
phpbb.com/support/documents.php?mode=install

Basically you can unzip the file you downloaded and upload the contents of that file into the directory to want phpBB to run in.

Then:

Once all the files have been uploaded to your site you should point your browser at this location with the addition of install/install.php.

You’ll need some info here about the php database you want to use.

Just download it and get your hands dirty. I guarantee you’re going to run into problems installing it no matter how much you read. You don’t have to worry about “breaking” anything so hop to it.

I haven’t officially started selling my hosting/computer services, but if you need a cheap host and/or help getting things setup, let me know :smiley:. I have fantastico so you can do the whole setup in less than 2 minutes.

I’d also recommend getting an account on phpBB. The people there were very helpful when I ran into problems with installation and other issues.

If your OS is Windows, maybe you could consider about Appserv. It is a package with apache,mysql,php. And it has addon of phpBB.