I didn’t read that either. I have no idea how you are equating Facebook with the newest smartphones or off-the-wall apps. I just happened to mention that Facebook has a mobile version which could give access to you group from a smartphone.
I’m sorry all your amazing life experience has given you an altered view on reality. It must be rough.
No, I just have enough experience not to believe the marketing, communication, interpersonal or human worlds are defined by the pop technologies of the last few years.
Hammers still do a damn fine job of driving nails. I don’t need a cloud-based, UX-optimized, quad-core-driven app to do it for me.
I believe in the right tool for the right job, and faddish attempts to make one tool do everything are usually misguided. I’ve recommended the best approach I know based on almost three decades of watching online communication alternatives come and go. You (and the OP) are free to ignore me.
Have you ever looked at a web site log? (Rhetorical - I’m sure you invented them) It’s rows and rows and rows of requests for Wordpress, vBulletin and PHBB scripts. On sites that do not run any of this software. On servers that don’t even support PHP.
Hacking Web software has little to do with getting in from the user interface and has a lot to do with identifying holes in the scripts and exploiting them via http. That’s why you have to be vigilant about keeping up the software and hope that the developers are one step ahead of the hackers.
If you run your discussion on a platform that someone else maintains, and isn’t open source, you don’t have to worry so much about it.
Yes, and all the trains run on time, to boot!
One of my considerations was that a group of professionals talking at a peer level might want real security for their conversation, not security from the masses while Big G peers in from above.
The only real hole in independent BBS security is unwanted user access. Since most BBSes run on the basis that users should be accommodated quickly and with maximum privileges, so as to entice them to stay and participate, the security levels are often absymally low. Locking down a system for a limited number of users who can be individually validated and approved by the operator closes 99% of the holes. There are very few holes and exploits in modern software that don’t depend on an “inside man” - be it a malicious user or a stupid one who posts hosted links, buggy images, etc.
Vbulletin and PhpBb are the stone age of Forums. Facebook groups has the advantage that people already use facebook. Barring that Discourse: http://www.discourse.org/
vBulletin is the obvious choice, as it is widely used and well supported. The cost is a couple of hundred bucks for a license plus hosting: I second the recommendation for URLjet as a vB host.
I’ve also heard good things about Xenforo. That would probably be my first choice if I wanted to set up a new forum and didn’t want to use vBulletin. I don’t know what it costs or what kind of hosting resources you’d need compared to vB, though.