This may be a biggie but I've just spent the entire morning looking for free forums on the internet. There seem to be a few but most insist on drenching your forum with their adverts, understandable as that's how they get their revenue but another issue is that if the forum gets to be big then you have all that tied up with them with no way of transferring your forum posts in the future. I'd much rather have a thoroughly trusted enterprise such as Winhost to host my forums for my various websites. Is there any possibility that Winhost could offer this service in the future? I think it is a bit too much to ask that we have to install PHP and then setup vBulletin what with all the database issues etc. If Winhost dug out an old machine from the cupboard and set it up so that we could host our forums on it that would be much easier regards ian in England
Actually I did find this: http://www.phpbb3now.com/ free with no ads and I think the easiest for me at the moment is just to set it as an href link to open in a new tab. This will do me for now thanks ian
PHPBB is pretty good. There's also Simple Machines Forum which is also a good alternative. It also depends on how much customization you want to do with it, and how flexible you'd like it to be.
The one I suggested doesn't have 'email me when a reply is made to this topic' or RSS feeds, two of my favourite functions for a forum. I'll have a look at the Simple Machines forum, thanks for the hint. ian
Does anyone know, can I install vBulletin ? What is the procedure for installing this PHP application? Cheers ian
While I don't have the steps down, it's a pretty straight forward installation. 1. Upload files. 2. Browse the install files. 3. Should be done? If you do run into any issues, you're more than welcome to post it here and we can help you out.
If you are considering buying a license for forum software like vBulletin, I would suggest an alternative; XenForo. the 4.x branch of vBulletin is going to give you nothing but heartache and trouble. I speak from painful personal experience.
Yay! got phpBB installed and working I managed to install phpBB then I upgraded from 3.0.8 to 3.0.10 I am very impressed! It is very configurable, I have my email notifications and my RSS feed (it has ATOM feeds) now if ever anyone posts a message on it and I'm sure they will eventually, I'll get that message straight to the RSS reader on my phone. Super. There is a big support community for phpBB at would ya believe phpBB.com Cheers ian
Great to hear it's working properly! If I may say, I'd recommend making sure PHPBB is always up to date with patches, to prevent any problems with hackers and such. PHPBB is one of the oldest and most popular free forum software, so there's always someone coming up with ways to abuse it.
