Free Forum Tools
There are a lot of tools out there that generate forums for free. I tested out quite a few to determine which were the best. Here are some of the best ones I found. For each entry, I also included a couple of others I tested which functioned well enough, but they usually weren’t terribly impressive.
Kazboard: The entire registration process for Kazboard took me less than five minutes. Within moments, my forum was up and running. Kazboard offers free, phpBB based forums, hosted on their own servers. I noticed a single, text-based advertisement placed on the bottom of my forum. It wasn’t terribly noticeable, and was one of the least obtrusive ads I noticed in my search. The forum was a fairly standard phpBB board, with all the standard options. Kazboard hosts the forum on their site, and you receive a URL in the form www.kazboard.com/yoururl. This may appeal to some users, but I would rather host the forum on my own site. Similar options: Easy Free Forum, forumsvibe.com, FreeForums.org
Invision Plus: If for some reason, you don’t like or don’t want a phpBB styl board, there are other options. Of these, the best I found was Invision Plus. I personally prefer the look of the phpBB boards, but Invision Plus looks nicer than most of the other non-phpBB free forums. It also offers several different choices of complete skins, something a lot of other boards lack. Invision Plus maintains a toolbar at the top of the forums that includes links to their site. This toolbar was somewhat intrusive, and it made navigating around the forum without going to other Invision Plus sites more difficult. I’m not as familiar with the control panel as I am with the phpBB control panel, but it looked like it had a fairly extensive set of options. Inivision Plus hosts the forum on their site, and you receive a URL in the form yoururl.invisionplus.net Similiar options: Proboards, AceBoard
phpBB: As far as I can tell, the best way to host a forum on your own site is using phpBB. This isn’t surprising, since the best options for forums hosted by someone else are also based on phpBB. The process for doing this is a little more complicated than registering for a free forum, but it isn’t too bad. Basically, you download the files from phpBB.com, upload them to your site, create a database for your forum, then go to your forum and fill out the required information. That should be enough to get your forum running. From there, you can customize everything pretty much the same way you would in a free forum. There are probably other free forums that you can host on your own site, but phpBB is fully featured, well supported, and easy to use. Beyond that, it looks good and is common enough that your visitors probably already know how to use it. I don’t know why you’d want to use anything else.
If you have your own site, I would highly recommend hosting a phpBB forum there. The process isn’t very complicated, and if you need help, feel free to ask me. Hosting the forum on your own site grants you a huge amount of control over the forum which you don’t get if you’re using a forum hosted on someone else’s site. It gives you control over advertising on the site, the URL of the forum, and various other options. It also let’s you be sure that your forum doesn’t disappear overnight. Free forum hosting companies can disappear without any notice whatsoever, and they’re likely to take your forum with them. If you host the forum yourself, you should be able to prevent that. Also, if you host your own forum, you can make significant changes at the file and database level. This is pretty advanced, but it’s an option you might eventually want if you want your forum to be around for awhile.
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