Setting up/running a forum

[z0diark]

Basically, I want to set up a forum for my university climbing club. I was wondering how difficult it was to do this to do as well as how hard it is to maintain. At the moment I'm thinking of using phpBB3 because it's free and I quite like the layout but if anyone has any other recommendations I'd be happy to hear them. We currently have a website so would I simply just have to copy and paste the source code to it or is it more complicated than that? I've no experience of running a forum/website but I learn quite quickly and am fairly good when it comes to computers.

 

ANY advice you can offer would be highly appreciated, thanks in advance.

[Ronan]

The initial setup procedure is a bit more complex than that, assuming you are setting it up on your own server rather than the pre-made forums that 'free' forum sites offer.

 

I've had good experiences with phpBB3 in the past and considering it's free it's definitely a good option to go with for a starting forum. Most forum-software follows the same setup procedure.

 

The standard procedure tends to be that you'll require a SQL database for the forum to interact with. You'll need the details of the host, the username, password etc. Alongside that, you'll need to upload some files which the forum operates from, modifying the file-attributes to allow reading / writing, and then run an installation script. These tend to be fairly easy to follow and providing you have the details things should run smoothly.

 

In terms of interaction with your website, it won't be pasting source-code, the primary linkage is simply through a URL to the forums main page.

 

For phpBB3, this page documents the installation procedure, so you may want to give that a read through :- Install

[Racheya]

^ good advice for if you want to host it on a server. The process *is* simple, but you need to have the basic ability to use FTP and things like that.

 

IF you don't want to, you can get pre-setup forum systems. Invisionfree used to be the big one, but nowadays Zetaboards is a free, pre-setup forum system that is pretty similar to the old Invision and phpBB.

 

The only problem is that they tend to come with advertisements built in, otherwise they're pretty fully functioning. I used to run pre-setup forum systems myself for quite a while, until I learned to install phpBB.

[dsavi]

You know, the other day I came across the best free, no setup phpBB3 hosting site I've ever seen- Particularly because it allows you to edit the theme, which is a considerable amount of control compared to other sites. http://phpbb.net/

 

I would still, however, recommend hosting it yourself if you have a server available. Installation isn't that hard and the level of control you get is so worth it. If you decide to do this, I would be glad to help you on this thread and I'm sure there are lots of other phpBB3 fans around here that could help you with that too.

[z0diark]

Thanks guys, especially for that link piesofdoom, it turns out one of my friends has experience setting up phpBB forums so hopefully we shouldn't have too much trouble. At the moment we're potentially looking at having it hosted by a friend's brother who has his own forum hosting website (though it looks like it'll be fluxBB rather than phpBB). Does anyone have any experience with fluxBB (is it any good etc) and what would the benefits of hosting the forum on our own server rather than on a third party website be?

[dsavi]

Apparently FluxBB is a fork of PunBB, which in my experience has very little to offer in terms of features. :|

[z0diark]

Apparently FluxBB is a fork of PunBB, which in my experience has very little to offer in terms of features. :|

What sort of features does phpBB have that PunBB doesn't?