Megan — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:49:35 +0000

Welcome, Geoff! Funny, we just had another Geoff join us a few days ago Why don't you stop buy the introductions forum and let us know a bit more about yourself?

I am going to bump this thread over to Webmaster's Corner since you might get some better responses there.

You'll probably want to look into forum script packages. Then you'll get everything packaged up and ready to go - you won't have to worry too much about what the technology is doing. You'll just need to install, customize, and go! You will need to have a scripting language and database available for the script to run. PHP and mySQL are a common combination. This forum uses vBulletin, which is a commercial produt. Another common one I hear a lot about is phpBB and I think it is free.

I think it would be best to have someone else host the site. That way you don't have to worry so much about uptime and that sort of thing and you may lose members if they can't get in when they want to. I think for forum sites especially people expect to be able to access the site at all times. If your computer can't handle the traffic or something goes wrong, you have to deal with that.

texpositor — Thu, 22 Apr 2004 14:46:01 +0000

Have a look at some of the open source stuff out there - e.g. Phorum (google for something open source forum or look on sourceforge ).

You will need to get a host unless you have a decent connection and a static IP address (if you don't know what this is you need to get it hosted). Your host should provide mysql or another database and would need to provide what ever scripting language the site uses (in the case of Phorum it is PHP)

Chris
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