I see that VBulletin seems to work pretty well, and can be made to take credit card orders, as SDMB uses it.
Is there another program/freeware to consider? I want to put up a board that discusses the answers to a large problem set. Making every question its own small thread means people would have a lot of trouble copying out the answers and pirating the content, and users could comment on and help refine the explanations of the answers. I also need to take credit card orders and have the logins become automatically valid on verification of payment.
I have found a geek kid who seems to think he can get this running, but neither of us have actually admined something like this.
I don’t have any suggestions (there are many freeware boards, but credit card integration is going to be more difficult to find), but I do have some comments…
Is this for a niche market? Google Answers tried a similar model for all questions and got shut down.
Also, if piracy of content is a real concern, setting it up as a forum isn’t going to stop much. It’s not hard to scrape a forum full of threads for their content.
It got shut down for legal reasons? I guess maybe it’s not that hard to scrape a forum, but at least it would put it out of the reach of most people. I suspect you’d also get all the replies, which would not be the meat of the site.
Without tipping my hand too much, this prep for a widely used, published problem set that many people end up cramming for. The nice part of the idea is that once the explanations are written, the rest is maintenance and refining. Eventually the problem set will change some, but that’s every few years.
I run a few phpBB boards, without any real issues. I don’t have fee-for boards, but I do know of a few subscription add-ins that work with it as well.
It’s not even all that bad to customize, I do new site layouts and skins offline and play with them, then just upload them to the hosting server. The only issue there, is if using Windows, you MUST clear of the IE cache manually every time you want to view a change.