What to know when creating a forum?
October 11, 2006 10:08 AM   Subscribe

If you manage other parts of your site that are PHP+MySQL, setting up your own forum is not difficult. I use phpBB. Either way, look forward to deleting forum spam if your membership is open.
posted by Doctor Barnett at 10:17 AM on October 11, 2006

Your own server at your house -- Your DSL provider may start throttling traffic or cut off your service for running a server.

An "outside one" at virtual hosting -- Ideal as long as you aren't going much over 500 users and 100 messages a day. If you go beyond that, your bandwidth/mysql usage may cause degraded service due to throttling or an overloaded shared computer.

An "outside one" on dedicated hosting -- Brisk speed, but the learning curve is much higher and you may be left on your own with DDOS attacks.

And from my own experience with numerous forum packages, vbulletin is the best by far, but if you don't want the price tag phpbb is great as long as you keep up with patches and don't apply more than a few mods.
posted by zek at 10:20 AM on October 11, 2006

Oh, also if you want to go the ultra-simple route, just go with a Yahoo Groups forum.
posted by zek at 10:21 AM on October 11, 2006

I would recommend going with Google Groups over Yahoo Groups if you want a very simple hosted, free, option. Yahoo Groups search was always hideously broken, at least last time I tried to use it. It made searching archives pretty much useless. I read some very high traffic groups that are hosted on Google Groups, and searching and stability seems very nice.
posted by rsanheim at 5:49 PM on October 11, 2006

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