Setting up a web forum on your website

So you have a website and want to set up a place where people can chat with each other. One of the best ways to do this is with a web forum as can be seen on my surfing website here. These forums can be very easy to set up but can become very difficult depending on how many modifications you want done to them. In order to run a web forum on your website you need a few things.

Those include your web domain of course, a database (usually provided by wordpress hosting providers), and the information from your database like the master username and password. Once you have all of that information you need to pick your forum. There are two forums that I recommend, one is vBulletin and is the best paid forum software. It costs $250 and does quite a bit. It requires very little technical skill to set up or to use the advanced features. The second I recommend and use myself is called phpBB. This is opensource so it is 100% free. Just like vBulletin it is very easy to use and set up. phpBB get complicated when you start doing advanced things. But it does do everything that vBulletin does it just requires more technical skill to do all of it. But setting each up and getting them up and running is no different. Those are the main differences between these two software packages (very high level differences).

At https://webhostinggeeks.com/versus/inmotion_vs_siteground/ you will find a company that provides innovative and secure solutions specialized for hosting all popular open source applications such as Joomla, WordPress, Magento, Drupal and many more.

Once you have decided which forum you want, you install it on your database. Once installed you will log in as an administrator and set up your forums and take special time to set up security measures like a captcha and such. Now that you are there your community is ready to communicate. You may notice that no one jumps the gun and begins to use it. Many forums go unused. People like to talk on a forum that is active because usually they lurk at first and just read posts before feeling comfortable enough to speak. So a little trick that is not fun but IS necessary – talk to yourself for a while on the forum using several different usernames to make the community seem alive. Even better if a few people can do this to get it going. It really helps and is needed even if it feels like you are scamming people. Trust me no one will post if there are zero posts unless you have a huge community or something.

Well I hope that helps you get started!

Posted in opensource, technology, Web 2.0 and tagged , , .

Leave a Reply