Forum hosting for my website - any suggestions?

[Pete Marsh]

I want to add a forum to my website (local history/touristy type stuff) so that visitors can add content and do all the stuff that forums are good at. Something like the CUK one would be nice, but the traffic will be a lot less.

Can anyone recommend a good way of adding a forum? I was thinking of solutions like:

• Installable forum s/w that I can host on my websites hosting package. I know little of coding php etc. though, so it would need to be easy to set up.
  
• Buying some cheap hosting that already has a forum installed, and linking to it from websites' main URL

I don't expect much traffic initially, but it would be nice if it could be scaled up if it proves popular.

FYI, at the moment the site is hosted by Webfusion, who seem to have a v motley collection of scripts for guestbooks and a 1990s look and feel forum. I paid £120 for a years hosting with them back in Sept , but I'll move hosts if there's a good enough reason.

[TheFaQQer]

I use Simple Machines Forum (SMF) for my website.

[scotspine]

it depends on a couple of things. what platform your provider provides and what you're comfortable with coding wise. i've never bought into a forum off the shelf but after having written a couple, http://www.yetanotherforum.net/ is a worthwhile open source one which uses microsoft [your provider seems to be an ms house] that someone could easily plug into your site.

[Pete Marsh]

it depends on a couple of things. what platform your provider provides and what you're comfortable with coding wise. i've never bought into a forum off the shelf but after having written a couple, http://www.yetanotherforum.net/ is a worthwhile open source one which uses microsoft [your provider seems to be an ms house] that someone could easily plug into your site.

Thanks for the quick responses.

Webfusion do a Linux package (http://www.webfusion.co.uk/webhostin...ssional-linux/) to, so the SMF solution looks do-able.

All of the rest of the files of the website are straightforward xhtml and css, but I chose the Linux hosting for no particular reason.

[MrMark]

I've used SMF too, and (fingers crossed) it's been fairly easy to set up and maintain. So long as your host supports php and gives you Mysql as the supporting database you shouldn't have any problems. They have a fairly good support site and forum too , if you need assistance. You will however (whichever forum software you use) have to deal with spammers at some point, so you'll have to read up on security measures eg captchas, non-automatic memberships etc. There's a good site at StopForumSpam, which maintains a blacklist of known spammers and relevant plug-ins to use that list.

[TheFaQQer]

I've used SMF too, and (fingers crossed) it's been fairly easy to set up and maintain. So long as your host supports php and gives you Mysql as the supporting database you shouldn't have any problems. They have a fairly good support site and forum too , if you need assistance. You will however (whichever forum software you use) have to deal with spammers at some point, so you'll have to read up on security measures eg captchas, non-automatic memberships etc. There's a good site at StopForumSpam, which maintains a blacklist of known spammers and relevant plug-ins to use that list.

That's what I do - it's missed two in about 9 months. I was manually deleting at least 50 a week before I installed it, so that's a big improvement as far as I'm concerned.

[Pete Marsh]

Yes, I had to abandon a simple guestbook on the site because some dork was posting garbage on an hourly basis, sorta like the online equivalent of vandalising a phone box. It was very difficult to stop due to the naffness of the scripts I alluded to above.

So I'll take a look at StopForumSpam, cheers for that - I presume the plugin of spammers available for SMF.

[Fred Bloggs]

Look no further than phpbb3, very nice indeed and very well supported. Probably the state of the art freeware php script forum. Try 34SP.com for low cost, reliable hosting. HTH.

[Cliphead]

+1 for phpbb, I have multiple installs and it works perfectly.

[Durbs]

http://www.yetanotherforum.net/ is a worthwhile open source one

Thumbs up here for yetanotherforum.net

Used phpbb in the past but used to have problems with it getting hacked unless it was kept updated all the time as there were so many vulnerabilities. Don't know whether its any better these days?

My yetanotherforum instance however has been running for ages and is an early version with no updates whatsoever and has never been hacked.