I'm SHOPPING for a Messageboard...
Like, who has them and are they good?
(that means, give some web addresses)
WHY are they free? I mean...
WHAT is the catch?
ARE there some attractively priced PAY boards?
HOW expensive is a UBB or V-Board?
And mostly:
WHICH ONE would you folks suggest if I wanted to give someone a messageboard on their site? The UBB style board is the de-facto web standard. Most of the free CGI scripted messageboards are FUGLY as HECK!
So, like, TELL already....
[ 03-09-2003: Message edited by: drewprops ]</p>
(that means, give some web addresses)
WHY are they free? I mean...
WHAT is the catch?
ARE there some attractively priced PAY boards?
HOW expensive is a UBB or V-Board?
And mostly:
WHICH ONE would you folks suggest if I wanted to give someone a messageboard on their site? The UBB style board is the de-facto web standard. Most of the free CGI scripted messageboards are FUGLY as HECK!
So, like, TELL already....
[ 03-09-2003: Message edited by: drewprops ]</p>
Comments
<a href="http://invisionboard.com/"; target="_blank">http://invisionboard.com/</a>;
The only 'catch' is that you can't remove the copyright or 'Powered by Invision Board' sayings on the page.
UBB has those things too, though, so it's not that big of a deal.
I did see this free forum site and it offers no banner, how I have no idea. The forum is sort of customizable and if you play with the colors, it can look pretty good for a free board.
<a href="http://www.akheva.com/"; target="_blank">Free forum</a>
I've done CGI and Perl stuff before, but not SQL stuff. Would Earthlink's commercial websites have SQL thingies? (Really, I'm not all that stupid a programmer, I just don't know SQL)
(going to read the docs on the invision product that I just downloaded)
<a href="http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/"; target="_blank">Their own website.</a>
<a href="http://andrewhitchcock.org/bb"; target="_blank">My forum.</a>
<a href="http://forums.gentoo.org"; target="_blank">Gentoo's Forums (very high traffic).</a>
It seems to me that a forum that gets over a certain size needs to be database driven as opposed to flat files, wouldn't it? Try searching this forum - takes ages - UBB is flat files...
Right?
adpowers beat me to it...
[ 03-10-2003: Message edited by: The Pie Man ]</p>
Earthlink/Mindspring is currently running version 3.0.x of PHP and BOTH of these really nice looking messageboards require at least version 4.0.x of PHP.
I just shot off a query to support to find out when and if they plan to move to ver. 4.0.x of PHP on their servers. Until then I'm dead in the water.
The setup seemed to be a breeze up until I determined that we're stuck at v.3 of PHP.
Again, only louder, GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!
<sigh>
I used to sell/give-away a message board I wrote for IIS and later for PHP. But It lost its fun factor and I stopped developing it. Honestly, PHPBB and vBulletin (even UBB) are much more feature rich and "cool" than my own ActiveBoardz, but ActiveBoardz is still -- to the best of my knowledge -- the fastest and least resource intensive message board that's not compiled.
The point is that usually there's a trade off between speed and usability. PHPBB is a god medium here. UBB is on the slow end, vB is slightly better but it's still slow. Both use a database backend but fail to "cache" a lot of static elements. (The reason why they don't is because the developers would have to completely rewrite the code to allow for large-scale pre-parsing. . . )
Check <a href="http://www.scifiminds.net"; target="_blank">my site</a> for an example of what you can do. It's using an old version (2.0 instead of 2.0.4) because upgrading modified code is hard, but it still runs fine.
Amorya
Woltlab is free, it's less nice than invisionboard, and it is a pain in the apple for Safari users - not safari compatible. So of the three I'd suggest Invisionboard. But Woltlab is ok, I have set that to one site and am not going to migrate it to e.g. Invision - as 95 % of the users in that particular site are in Windows.
[ 03-10-2003: Message edited by: Mulattabianca ]</p>
We're using for many different applications here at UVM, and we've all been very happy with it.
-Rob
<strong>vBulletin (2.3.0) is a joy. But it's not free. If you have as much traffic than AI has or more, get that. The free versions of the boards won't beat that. The admin and mod options are more powerful than here. And so far .. I haven't found any problems that AI or Macnn had with their boards with it.
</strong><hr></blockquote>
I don't know why you think a free board wouldn't do as well as a commercial board (unless you are selling one of the commercial boards
For a site having over 15 000 registered users, the price of that is not eccessive.
If you have 150 or 1500 users, I'd suggest Invision free version.
Earthlink supports PHP 4.x, but your file has to have the extension of ".php4". This would mean a total rewrite of every PHP file that I've uploaded to the server...
but get THIS!!!!!:
Earthlink says they don't have SQL server.
I'm starting a new thread about service providers....
I use it on <a href="http://www.forums.macwrite.com"; target="_blank">my forums</a> and find it's the best forum software around.
I tried invision board, phpbb, and a few other, and man were they bad on the admin side.
also vbulletin 3 is just around the corner, and is going to blow any of the free boards out of the water.
vBulletin can handle alot <a href="http://www.hometheaterforums.com"; target="_blank">Home Theater Forums</a> at any given time has over 1,000 people on-line and is reliable.
<a href="http://www.qksrv.net/click-307161-1163318"; target="_blank">vbulletin</a> is $160, but well worth it.
I can even help you install it if you wish. Also vBulletin 2 supports PHP3. the extention is .php3.
Try <a href="http://www.tera-byte.com"; target="_blank">Tera Byte</a> $9.25/month I was hosted with them for 2 years for my Mac site, and only left becuase my site needed a dedicated server.
200MB space PHP 4.2.2 1 MySQL database. 99 e-mail accounts. Don't use ISP's for hosting they rip you off big time.
[ 03-11-2003: Message edited by: Mac Write ]</p>