Message Board Software

What does it take (time and $) to operate a message board like this one? I’ve seen other boards using the exact same software so it must be commercially available.

Would it be cost effective for a group of about 125? Is there other software available that might be a better fit?

TIA

The software the SDMB uses is vBulletin, which costs $85/year, or $180 + $30/year (for updates) if you purchase it outright.

I know nothing about time or server costs.

Or you could always get phpBB, which is free, and has (as far as I’ve seen) much the same features.

Note that you can’t always just shove vBulletin or whatever software on your home computer and let everyone in the world access it. Many ISPs have strict limits on what they let you do on a home account, and typically they block access for things that you would find on a typical server. ISPs typically will charge a lot more for a “server” connection. You may have to host your board somewhere, so you’ll likely have charges associated with that as well.

For the small number of users that you have, you might want to just set up a yahoo or msn group that everyone can access. Those are free.

With the traffic that the SDMB gets, you’re looking at a lot of money for hosting; you need a dedicated server.

vBulletin and a good US$20/month Linux-based shared hosting plan, and you’re in business for anything with under 150 users/guests per 15 minute block.

My advice: start with a good free forum program (I’d recommend Simple Machines), and if the site becoems successful, upgrade to vBulletin. You can transfer messages from SMF (and most popular message boards) to vBulletin.

I have my own personal web site and phdbb came with it. I even played around with it and have my own bulletin board out there somewhere but I can’t even remember the URL. It seemed full featured and is actually very similar to the software this board uses. That would make the total cost of a web site with hosting and a bulletin board less than $80 a year. You can probably find cheaper as well. I would think that anyone could afford it and it seemed like it could be set up in a matter of hours.

Here is my very un-setup Phpbb bulletin board that I just looked up. It will give you a rough idea of what it looks like. It is opensource so a lot of hosting companies just throw it in for free.

http://maverickpace.com/v-web/bulletin/bb/index.php

I found phpBB a bit of a pain to update and patch. SMF is much simpler and has a few extra features like attachments that you have to mod phpBB to get.
Also free and easy to set up if your hosting provider has a control panel like Fantastico or similar…