Making a Forum! (1 Viewer)

[Chickadee]

Hey can anyone send me on my way to make a good forum, the steps involved, stuff like that... do you also know where i can find the code and skins for a forum....thanks!

 

[AsyLum]

www.vbulletin.com
http://invisionfree.com/

 

[Lavenderpup]

You do not need a domain. But hosting with php and mysql is the minimum requirement unless you want to deal with those tacky proboards etc. CGI boards are usually banned because of the resources used.
Try Phpbb/smf/xmb which are free forum scripts.
http://freewebspace.net should have some places that give php/mysql hosting for free (though I suppose one would have to post). But of course they aren't all that reliable.

 

[withoutaface]

www.phpbb.com

 

[AsyLum]

Uh, yes, thanks for pointing that out - im sure she didnt realise that from my post.

We're not all as tech-savvy as you politik, some people didn't get industry experience in their youth

 

[MedNez]

To Summarise:

You have two options-

• 1. Free hosting
• 2. Paid hosting

1. Free hosting

This isn't hard to find, but finding free hosting without tonnes of advertising is. You need free advertising that will run:

* PHP
* MySQL
* 10mb space at least

Once you have this, move on to step 3.

2. Paid Hosting

Also easy to find, you don't have ads etc, but for basic packages with support for things like forums, that's still a lot of money in a year to justify something that might not be what you expect.

Forums are incredibly hard to make self propagating, until you have a large enough user base that likes interacting with itself. The more users, the easier the self propagation

3. Which forum?

www.vbulletin.com Same as BoS
http://invisionfree.com/ Another nice free forum
www.phpbb.com One I'd recommend, very nice to use

You can also find hosting JUST FOR FORUMS at http://invisionfree.com/. This would save you alot of time, I think.

Other guides?

http://cse.ssl.berkeley.edu/sii/metaform/ttmake.html
http://www.forumer.com/
http://www.aceboard.net/