I'm working on a website and want to include a forum. Now I wonder which way to go. I need the software to be freeware - it has to be free and legal to use, as it's not my own site. I need easy and full customization - the forum has to look like the rest of the site, and since I will not be admin forever, someone else eventually will need to take over, and that person may or may not be someone with computer skills. Also, I can imagine some freeware will have advertisements on the site. I can't have that either, I need full control of what is visible. I saw Anyboard, or rather read a review, and love the possibility to interact with the forum by email alone: posting by email and receiving posts as email. Currently, the community I build the site for, correspond by email alone, and there are some concerns that having to go to a website and log into a forum will be too much trouble for some. So the opportunity to keep working as always while still opening the possibility for forum participation is awesome. But I don't know anyboard, so there may be downsides. Does anyone know any? I am building the site in PHP, so any forum software requiring ASP is out of the picture. Any help is greatly appreciated!
Well yeah, phpbb seems nice - but now that I've seen Anyboard's feature of interacton with the forum by email alone, I want that.. and so far, I haven't found it in the phpbb's list of hacks...
SMF is a bit better than phpbb from what I hear. Of course, I use it in my own forum. EDIT: (Fixed my spelling) The website is www.simplemachines.org.
Thanks guys, I'll have a look at it. So far I've installed PHPBB with the mail2forum hack, which allows posting to the forum by email, and emailing of forum-posts - however, so far that works only for 1 forum/mailinglist-combo. I'll check out SMF for hacks.
invisionfree is ok. It's what I use but you can't hack it. Just really easy to use for those who can't program and don't have their own webspace to host it on.
I like PHPBB. I love it a LOT more than I do IPB. It has more stuff, easier to moderate, and IPB kind of reminds me of an organization that I despise. I wish i could get a cgi phpbb. Demo : forum hosting
So, you arrive, and bump a thread that is almost 2 years old? Or were you searching for info? Which is strange, considering you could get MUCH better information about this subject searching Google, or some other 'computer/internet' website. Is that you Faceman?
