Hi So I have been building a website for a colleague at work and one fot the requirements is a forum. Invites for forum will be private as there is an element of vulnerability for users. It needs to be able to add to the bottom of pages sometimes akin to the bit-tech comments page. But, really, I don't want to have to pay for this... WHO'D HAVE THOUGHT? And neither does the recipient. So I'd like some recommendations: Security is going to be an issue. Must allow private invites only. Is there a good opensource forum I can download and run on apache that does all this? If not, is there a good externally hosted free one that can deliver close to the needs? If you think that hosting the forum myself via apache is a silly idea please let me know. I am open to suggestions. If you also think that I won't get what I want for free let me know. I need to give an honest appraisal of the solution. There maybe a bigger site that I will be making off the back of this where I can charge, or set up a subscription for customer, so all advice is welcome. If you have to pay, you have to pay. Just be nice if you didn't have to... I have no qualms with going it alone for fun. Background info as to why I want to host it: I currently have hosting space in a colocation service that I need to make use of. My flatmate/longtime friend/work colleague is a ccna and all that jazz and wants to start a small business to pay for the luxury of the colo. We are not looking to set the world on fire! We use it for backups and super fast downloads. I will initially be running things on a home windows pc as it is proper easy to do so. But as an until recently long term linux user (only jumped ship for games and can't be bothered with a dual boot environment although I certainly aren't an expert with gnu/linux or even windows for that matter) will be using Ubuntu server(avoiding, once again, licencing costs). Thanks
phpBB3 but you will need to configure it to stop spam accounts being created, it can easily be hosted on any machine, but you will need php installed on any webserver you want it to run on. phpbb website hosting yourself is fine, but make sure your internet connection can handle the traffic if there are going to be a lot of users
Cool. I've done little research on it, but have seen phpBB3 popping up as an option online. So, until my lunch break I have not much chance to have a look(something about working/doing my job properly or stuff), but I take it you can download this solution and run it yourself from a lamp/wamp(whatever they want to call it) installation. Or is this a free hosted solution. I saw, one of the advantages of a free hosted solution is that updates for security will be handled by the hoster. For accounts, it will be invite only. I'll have a look at configs if it is a download and install job. Styling won't be a massive issue and I am sure it can be handled easily if the solution is half built already. Thanks for this. The colo has about 90mbps down, 32mbps up. So hopefully with the amount of users(which will be slim) this will not be an issue. Our cap is also quite generous. 4 or 5 terrabyte or something if I remember correctly.
i only use windows machines, the forum i host on my machine is on server 2008, basically you download it, copy the files to your webserver onto any site you want the forum hosted on, make sure you know the url, because you will need to access the forum installation folder, through your webbrowser you may need to set some permissions on the folders/files, but when you try to install it, it will let you know why it didnt install if it fails. it's easy enough to do, just takes a little time, you can use sql server, but i found it easier to use a mysql database
