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In another topic, I expressed some surprise (and dismay) that I didn't know about free forum hosting before. I imagine I'm not the only one who was clueless about this option.
In short, with a free forum host, you don't need a website or domain name to have your own community forum.
A search of "free forum" or "free forum hosting" will bring up quite an extensive list of places that offer free bulletin board forums. How can they offer this service for free? Simple. Advertising. In exchange for giving you a free community forum, they place ads on your forum.
I'd selected about a dozen or so different companies. Then I whittled it down to about 4, based on support options, board options, and types of ads. I eliminated those that used pop-up ads, or that didn't have an active, vibrant support forum. I also favored those that offered a searchable forum directory.
Some even offer your choice of phpBB or IPB, while others only specialize in one.
Now, getting to the best part:
My daughter wanted a phpBB board. She is a member of a phpBB forum, so she's familiar with that layout.
Last evening, she signed up with Forum For Free.
The sign-up process was quick and easy. As quick as they advertise on their home page, she had a forum! And she barely needed my help. Once I told her to go to her Admin Panel, she was off and running without any input from me. Within about 1 hour, my 10-year-old daughter had done this:
Tokyo Mew Mew And Other Anime Forum
(Don't ask me what it all means, because I'm clueless as to this Mew Mew stuff.)
As you can see, the ads are not intrusive, they're just Google Ads. I'm not sure if that's all this company uses. I've seen some companies that rotate between Google Ads and banner ads - those look OK also.
I eliminated ezboard because every time I clicked on a forum I got pop-ups, even though I'm supposed to have them blocked.
Anyway, I thought I'd bring this free forum option to your attention. Here are the possibilities:
1. It's a great way to get your feet wet with forums without spending a lot of time or money.
2. If you have a personal website with your ISP, you could link to your forum from your website.
3. You could link to your forum from your blog, your eBay About Me page, your sig line, etc.
4. You could experiment with both phpBB and IPB to see which one you like to work with the best, or ezboard if you don't mind the pop-ups.
5. If you're paying for webspace, but don't want the hassle of trying to install phpBB software yourself, now you don't have to.
6. If you prefer IPB over phpBB, but didn't get it for your paid website because it's not free, well, now you can have IPB remotely hosted for free.
7. If you had ideas for more than one type of forum, but could only have one installed on your web space, now you can have as many forums as you like.
And so on...please pardon my enthusiasm.
Um, another thing. My daughter had spent maybe 10 minutes at most setting up her forum, and already Google was crawling her forum!
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That's very informative, Brenda.
Thank you.
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Anytime, Kathleen. I've gotten so much from here over the years, and especially the webmaster forums lately, that I want to give back some whenever I can.
I'm going to sign up and try a free IPB forum to see how it works.
If anyone else tries free forum hosting, could you please post about your experiences? It would be quite helpful to everyone, I'm sure.
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Hey Brenda,
Good links & tips, thank you for posting those
I had previoiusly tried Forumer free forums, which was very similar in looks to the one you/ your daughter are using and it too was super simple to set up. I never did anything with it (thats just my standard MO though, nothing to do with the site features or usability!) but the only drawback I could see was their community-listings / directory was not user-friendly for finding a particular forum (to me anyway)
I've also used ezBoard and while it was pretty easy and had alot of features there are just too many of them - if you don't have a set list of people you can invite to make it pretty active from the start it's hard to get a draw of "new users" - again, in my experience at least. *Plus most people from around here already have a bad taste regarding ezBoards.
I have also been a part of "groups" type forums and let me tell you those STINK! I belonged to one group that moved from MSN groups to Yahoo (and OMG I thought MSN was difficult to get used to but the Yahoo groups were SO MUCH worse!) and then they moved to their own site but with a free Bravenet forum as an add-on. and it was like ... all I can say is stay AWAY from anything hosted or provided by Bravenet. Their motto should be "It's FREE and You Can Tell!"
Looks like you've picked a pretty decent one - my only other thoughts would be GIVE IT TIME! I know you mentioned somewhere else about how long should it take to grow a decent following on your site/boards and i'd say it's going to take you quite awhile - just keep spreading the word to people you think would enjoy your topic(s), and keep your blog & board content new (even when it seems you're only talking to yourself ... never know who is reading it and when lurkers could decide to become posters ...)
GOOD LUCK!
~ gem ~
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Thank you for sharing your experiences, gem.
I'd noticed that their directory wasn't searchable either - quite a few free forum hosts aren't. Having a directory at all is a plus, many of them don't, or they have so few categories you'd wind up getting dumped in "General".
I set up a "test dummy" Invision Power Board with Forum For Free. I found it much more complex than phpBB - I can see why they don't recommend that for novices. I found myself getting frustrated during the configuration process - it has many more menus and options than phpBB. There was a lot that I didn't understand. At the time I was working with it, I had about 2 hours to spare, which I thought would be enough, but it wasn't.
I plan to explore their support board in great detail to learn more about the IPB board configuration process before I set up the IPB board I would like to keep.
There is another board option that maybe not too many people know of - Simple Machines Forum. My web host offered it along with phpBB. It has a few more features than phpBB, but I decided to go with phpBB, as they've been around longer. I may also give it a try though, to see what it's like. I can install it on my website in a different directory.
If you don't have webspace, here's a free SFM forum host: SMF For Free. That's the only one I could find in a search. As the software becomes more widely known, there will probably be others forum hosts offering it as an option.
Can you tell that I'm enjoying playing with setting up forums?
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Well, yesterday was a busy day. I installed an SMF forum on my website to see how it worked. Here's a rundown:
SMF is a little more complex than phpBB, but not overly so. If you can do phpBB, then you can do SMF.
SMF has excellent integrated help. You can click on the question marks to get help with the features. Their support board is very good and the search feature works pretty well. Someone even wrote an illustrated tutorial on setting up new themes. However, there is no online user guide such as phpBB has. In that respect, phpBB is far better IMO.
I played around with modifying the templates, adding smilies, avatars, etc. Some aspects of modifying the templates I found easier than phpBB, others were harder. Adding smilies was easier, with one less step than phpBB. Avatars used the same process as phpBB.
SMF has an integrated calendar and more in-depth site stats than phpBB.
Overall, I would recommend SMF. I'm hard-pressed to say whether SMF is better than phpBB, or vice versa.
I'm a total novice when it comes to templates and styles. I've learned to change the colors to provide different subSilver options on my phpBB forum, and that's about it. I thought the procedure for doing that with SMF was smoother.
However, the templates that come with SMF didn't allow me to change the logo and have it look nice - more of an overall style change would be needed from someone who knows what they're doing.
I couldn't modify the header in SMF very well at all. I had to put my changes in the footer (Google Ads, stats counter, and dynamic quote), and I wasn't as happy with the way that looked. I screwed up the code more than once trying, whereas with phpBB, I had a lot less trouble figuring it out and I got the results I wanted fairly easily.
For sure, if you're modifying your forum template, always make a copy of the original code first. That way if you mess it up, you'll have the original to put back in - otherwise you'll get a parsing error (whatever that means) and you won't be able to access your forum.
As far as looks go, the basic SMF templates have more of a phpBB look and feel, rather than the more sophisticated look of a vBulletin or Invision Power Board.
The administration panel in SMF is almost as easy as phpBB. It just has more features.
I haven't worked any more with the Invision Power Board I set up. I've tried to find some good online help, but I haven't been able to. When I search the support board, I can't get good results. I've used the proper search coding, but still, I get a lot of irrelevant results. I don't know if I'm doing something wrong, or if the IPB boards have poor search capabilities.
The forum host provided a link to IPB documentation at the Invision website, but you need a login and password to access it. The login with the free forum host doesn't work, naturally, so unless you're a direct customer of IPB, you're out of luck there. I'm not sure why they license the software to be used for free forum hosting, then cut them off from the documentation, but that's the way it is.
So, while IPB looks the fanciest, has the most features and options, it was my least favorite of the 3, only suitable for people who really know what they're doing.
Like Jim.
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More great information, bjgrolle, thanks for sharing your experiences and knowledge!
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No problem, Diane. Although I'm not sure how much of that was knowledge vs. just plain old bumbling around.
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An update on the Invision Power Board (IPB):
While doing a somewhat unrelated search yesterday, I accidentally stumbled on InvisionFree .
In short, their help files are awesome! They have step-by-step documentation on the Administration Control Panel. Also, I was able to search the board with no trouble and immediately find anything and everything I was looking for.
I was encouraged enough to set up an IPB on their site. Within a short time, I had the board totally configured, and it was much easier than the other Invision hosting site I'd tried to work with.
I wouldn't have thought the experience would be so much different, but it was.
Overall, I would rate the 3 boards I've tried in order of difficulty as follows:
1. phpBB
2. SMF (Simple Machines Forum)
3. IPB (Invision Power Board)
The level of difficulty increases necessarily as the amount of features the boards offer increases.
As far as the end user - the poster - there isn't that much difference. phpBB lets the poster edit their profile all on one screen. Both SMF and IPB have a menu bar to the left which show the different editing choices. It's not complicated though.
My best advice based on my new experience with the IPB is this:
When choosing a free forum host, spend some time at their support boards. Is it easy to find the information you want by scanning the topic titles and doing a search? If you want step-by-step instructions, make sure they're there in a format you can follow. (Again, with phpBB, their site itself provides that.)
As I found, if you don't have access to good support, you'll give up in frustration.