I’m wanting to host my own message board, something similar to this one which, aside from the hamster issues, is awesome. The problem is that all the sites I can seem to find thru google are pretty awful… which is to be expected for free sites.
But I’m willing to pay a reasonable amount for something better.
Anybody got any suggestions for me?
Why do you think YaBB is awful? I’ve not had any problems with it.
Possibly because I’ve never heard of it before just now. Thank you for the link.
Ahh. On further examination, I find this:
I don’t know FTP or HTML, I can upload I suppose but what is CHMOD? I sure don’t know Perl, and don’t as far as I know have it on my web account, which is Verizon DSL.
Thanks anyway.
Anybody else?
If you can’t handle the technical side, and you’re willing to pay, what you should looking for is a bulletin board hosting company. They run the software for you, all you do is the admin tasks.
I have two suggestions:
For hosting, PowWeb. $7.77/month for 40GB of bandwidth is a hell of a deal. I don’t have any affiliation with them whatsoever except that I signed up for a 3-month account with them (the minimum you can get) and they seem to deliver on every one of their promises. I’m planning on relocating a message board I currently host to their service soon.
If you want to host a message board on PowWeb, you’ll need some software, obviously. PowWeb supports the PHP programming language (as well as perl and some other CGI stuff, but that’s not relevant here) and gives free access to a MySQL database server. With PHP and MySQL you can run my personal favorite forum software, FUDForum. It’s completely free software, released under the GNU General Public License, so it won’t cost you a dime, and it works like hell. I set up a community forum for my ex-girlfriend using this software and have been impressed with it at every turn. Right now I’m hosting it on an rickety old 400 Mhz AMD machine with 128M of RAM and it’s humming along quite nicely, but I plan to relocate it to PowWeb at some point and I imagine it’d be capable of handling a much higher load if it ever becomes an issue. I have no affiliation with the FUDForum people, either - I just really love their software, and the price can’t be beat.
Feel free to e-mail me (my e-mail’s in my profile) if you need some basic help with concepts like FTP, HTML, perl, etc. I’m a geek for fun and profit and I don’t mind lending a hand.
I changed to turboweb.net cause they have a MySQL forum for free. It’s called phpBB2. (There is a Yabb to phpbb2 converter on the net). I used Yabb for a couple of years but didn’t want to have to deal with CGI permissions, etc, anymore.
Besides, phpBB2 has a very quick & easy backup/restore function. But I just use the turboweb.net website backup function instead because it backups you your whole web site into a download GZ file with just one/two clicks.
We use Snitz Forum software on our site. I don’t know how much coding is involved since my husband set it up, but it’s free and works much like this one.
SmackFu, thanks, you’re correct that that is exactly the type of thing I’m looking for. Some good information in the posts that link sent me to.
Pestie, also a good link. This looks a bit more like what I’m looking for.
Let me elaborate on that a bit; I would like a messageboard which I can customize if I want (probably make it look and work a lot like this one, I hate those long strings of indented threads some other message boards seem to prefer). The bandwidth would be pretty low, only a couple dozen people logging in a few times a day. It looks like PowWeb offers this, as well as some substantial storage space and a domain name… much more than I know that I want, and at a pretty good price too.
Keep in mind that I’m a relative newbie to the ‘real’ internet, having been sheltered within the smothering womb of AOL for many years now.
To see if I understand the concept here: I purchase an account from them which allows me a certain amount of storage space, and a certain amount of monthly/daily bandwidth usage to access that space. Using this storage, I can create and host my own domain (.com etc) and its related websites. Among those websites I may create a forum such as this one. I then download to my own computer some software which enables me to create a forum within the storage space I’ve purchased. My home computer does not need to be actively connected for others to access and post to this forum, that’s what I’m paying them for. The total storage of this forum, including very old posts that have not been deleted by me, is included in the storage of my account, and the total traffic of those reading and posting to my website and forum, and/or downloading/uploading, is included in the daily/monthly bandwidth amount.
Phew!
If all that is true, and I’m not missing something important, I think PowWeb might well be what I’m looking for.
600MB of storage holds one heck of a lot of text. Pictures, not so much, but I guess they can be restricted or hosted offsite, so that’s going to be more than enough for my project.
45Gig of bandwidth, apparently restricted to 2G a day. I don’t THINK the 30 or so people who will have access will be able to use that up.
And the additional benefit of both a website and an entire domain name. Way cool.
Anybody out there able to do better than this? q;}
The message board I host uses about 2.5 - 3 gigs a month with data compression (which PowWeb has enabled, if I remember correctly). And we have 500+ users, 30 or so of which are regular users, logging in several times a day. The 2G/day limit should be no problem. And 600MB is nearly a full CD worth of data - that’s a lot of jpeg images. My digital camera stores nearly 160 high resolution, full-size, full detail pictures on a 128M flash memory card.
The FUDForum software is very much like vBulletin, which the SDMB uses. It’s completely customizable and you only have to get into HTML/PHP coding if you really want to - the board is very usable and customizable just using the extensive admin options. Poke around a bit on penrick.com if you want to see how things are laid out by default. I didn’t change much of anything there.
1dollarhosting is another place I use. It has a CGIBIN & unlimited traffic for a dollar a month.