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Forum Software

Posted: Thu Apr 02, 2009 6:26 pm
by NEB
Greetings,

I am planning on launching a forum (non martial arts related) in the near future and wonder if I could get any advice on which software to use. Or, perhaps better stated, which ones NOT to use! I realize that this particular discussion board is running on phpBB. I've been a member here for quite a few years, and can say that from a user standpoint it seems really good. I have also looked into myBB as well. Both are free and open source, so there is no advantage there.

Any direction, advice or pointers here would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

nb

Forum software. . .

Posted: Fri Apr 03, 2009 12:15 am
by gmattson
None are perfect. We have had pretty good luck with ours. (thanks to Ted)

Keeping the spammers and jerks off are the biggest problem. Some software options allow everyone who registers to become a member. Some spam software can do this registering without any human input. I remember a photo gallery our site had, where people could make comments.

I hadn't checked it for a couple of weeks and discovered over a thousand computer generated comments made on the site. (mostly porno related) I tried to delete them all, but after a couple hours and with about 2% deleted, I decided to delete the program with all the photos.

Tough lesson.

I delete a couple human registrations a day. . . mostly from someone eager to promote his gold product site. . . Once you get behind, they begin posting and that can be done with a program that requires no human touch. Thats when you have real problems.

Be prepared. . . regardless which software you select. . . to be watchful and enforce your rules strictly.

Good luck

Posted: Sun Apr 12, 2009 4:34 am
by NEB
Thanks for the reply and information. Sorry it took me so long to check back in. I ended up giving MyBB a try. We'll see how it goes. There is a lot to learn just on the technical side. Especially considering my rather limited understanding of things like MySQL, CentOS, and managing servers in general.

But, its up, and hopefully, will be running smoothly for a while.

nb