Hi, so I run a TF2 comunity of which we have our own public game server and website with forums. The web host provider have kindly offered a free service but are now changing to a pay for only service. As we have our own IBM Blade that we use for hosting our TeamSpeak server along with some other bits, I am thinking to move our clan website over to this server as we already pay for hosting here, so we would not be paying out needlessly for a 2nd web host solution. My biggest issue here is that ive never setup apache before on linux nor have I setup any kind of forum from the ground up, how tricky is vBulletin to setup and maintain, are there other easyer to setup forums that anyone could recommend as I seem to recall that vBulletin requires us to pay a licence for its use? As ive not setup this before I wonder if any of you have some advise you can offer with this or know anything that I might be missing from this puzzle that would be usefull to know. Thanks Delph.
phpBB is free, I believe, and not much different to vBulletin. As well as Apache, you'll also need at least PHP & MySQL installed on the server. There are loads of howtos on the interwebs, they are probably your best bet. Personally, I'd practice on a local machine (do you have an old, spare PC knocking around somewhere?) before you try to install on the live machine. That way, you'll be able to sort out any gotchas before it gets anywhere near a live environment.
Spare pc in bits atm, but easy enough to launch a Virtual Machine, PHP & MySQL right o cheers Ill take a look into phpBB also, thanks for the tips
I just installed a phpBB 10 minutes ago! It's reallllly easy, the instructions cover everything and as long as you have your database details to hand its a piece of cake, cheesecake to be exact.
I'd definitely look into PHPBB3 as well, as others have mentioned. Both it and vBulletin have plusses and minuses, and while I think a lot have an insane amount of cruft and unnecessary complication in their code (yay feature-creep!), they're fairly solid on the whole. I think PHPBB's admin interface is MUCH better than vB's (at least the version I *cough* obtained where I've been doing some testing), though I don't think either is really great. Of course almost as a rule I hate working with existing codebases, but forums are notorious for having a ton of nearly-useless stuff that about four people on the face of the earth know about - enough that I've been very tempted to write my own from scratch. Well, I will eventually, it's just off in the land of 3.0 for what I'm doing and I'm working to finish 1.0 right now. Anyways, installation is trivial for both. Same as most PHP apps really - give it database info, optionally a couple of very obvious other fields, and click 'go'. Setting up Apache, PHP, and MySQL will be quite a bit harder, and it's not really difficult at a basic level. And yes, vBulletin isn't free in any sense of the word. It's only $80 or so I think. PHPBB3 is free (and I think open-source, not sure what license), as are most other php-based forums.
Did they fix phpBB3 then? I know phpBB2 was - how can I put this - plagued with injection & security problems, so much so that I pretty much erased all existence of it from my mind. [thread moved & re-tagged]
Having used PHPBB and other forum types (and ported the database from one to another on multiple occasions) I would be inclined to say check out Simple Machine Forums also. I find it to be far nicer. Add Tiny Portal on for a front end and things are good
Also read up on securing Apache if this will be a public server. All very well having a secure forum, but useless if your root password is "qwerty" and you have apache (hence PHP) running as root. Running everything web-facing chrooted is a very safe bet, if possible. You can do this with apache (and probably MySQL) http://www.petefreitag.com/item/505.cfm
I think they went through and cleaned up all of the security stuff. In fact, I'm fairly sure that the majority of the v3 codebase was rewritten from scratch. Dunno, I never had a security issue with v2 but then again my forums weren't nearly the size of Bit either.
