OK, my corp in EVE Online needs a web page and forum dealy … so I need a bit more information.
Using any number of HTML editors, pretty much anybody can make a decent looking webpage, but I know pretty much nothing about forums …
Help?
/me looks hopeful
Free, very minimal ads.
If you want to host it yourself and your hosting account includes PHP and MySQL support, you might consider tForum, a free message board package very similar to vBulletin. It’s completely cusomizable, has several addons available, offers a great community support forum and is entirely free. Years ago, I did some programming and developed a few addons for them.
OK, so say I have this spare desktop, and am willing to leave it up 24/7 - with for sake of argument some version of Linux … that would be running my own server?
Like I said, I am interested in combining a web page and forums, and am a bit at a loss. I was randomly googling for forum stuff, and found nabble … it looks like I would have it on my computer and my computer being the server, and I would buy a domain name from somewhere …
is there an rpg walkthrough for something like this? lol …
sort of load Suse x.x, add Xprogram, Yprogram and Zprogram, go online and give the members their email addys and logings for the forum?
Dreamhost (and others most likely) offer one-click installations of PHPBB, which is a pretty decent free board software solution. It’s not as feature-rich as vBulletin, but it’s free.
Grab a domain name from a register , and then get an account with a hosting company. For best results these entities should be separate ,as to provide a seamless change over should you have issues with the host.
Most hosts should have a choice between a microsoft and linux system, and will have a dashboard feature that allows you to install canned and stable versions of a number of different software packages , like phbbb forums.
For the webpage itself , while you are coding your own page, I would recomend that you go with wordpress. Its a blogging software but with the amount of themes out there it lends itself to being a main page easily.
Declan
Last I looked, it was more feature-rich than the installation of vBulletin with which I’m most familiar 
I’d advise against running your own web server from home, unless you’ve agreed this with your ISP. Best to get cheap hosting from someone like GoDaddy or whatever webhost is recommended these days - I don’t know. Make sure your host supports a scripting language like pHp, and a database system like mySQL.
Then I would second (or third, or whatever) the recommendation to use PHPBB to build your forum.
Very easy and quick setup.
FYI, if you’re looking to make a free site, check out site
They bought jotspot and made it very easy to add and manage pages. I love it.