How to Create a Message Board for your Website
Posted by Administrator on December 12, 2008 · 3 Comments
If you have a active website, or if you want to create a community forum for your website, then creating a message board might be an good idea.
What is a Message Board or a Forum ?
A message board is the same as a forum. It’s used to create a community. You can also use it as a support page where visitors can adress their problems and others can reply to their problems. A Forum is where you can create multiple categories just like Music, Hobbies, Sports ect. and visitors can come to that page, register and basicaly share info. Now what makes it cool is that other visitors can come and comment on these forums. If you want an professional definition it’s:
A place to post messages in response to an article or online forum where replies are nested directly under it.
How do you create a Forum ?
I’m going to explain how to create a forum in a very easy simple way. There is 2 ways how you can create a forum.
- Register off a 3rd party website where your forum will be hosted for free.
- Install a forum in your hosting account and have full power over it.
Choice #2 sounds more interesting than choice #1 because “you have full power over it” well that’s not the case like most of the people think. Managing a forum is not very easy at all, unless you use a ready-to-go-system like VBulletin, SMF, PHPbb ect.
- Create a forum from 3rd party website: makeforum.org uses PHPbb forum to create free forums for you. It’s 100% free and easy to use. Here is their feature I coppied right from their homepage:
- Forum phpBB3
- Completely free
- Unlimited forums, posts & users
- Unlimited storage
- Unlimited bandwidth
- Upload attachments
- 210+ Templates
- Custom mods
- All Languages
- Free subdomains (5 domains)
- Upload a custom logo
- Fully customizable
- Search engine friendly
- Fast, reliable and secure
- Full control panel
- Spam free
- Technical support
- Install a forum right in your hosting account: this is the system I am professioned at. SMF or Simple machines is the easiest forum to install and use in both Windows server and Linux server! Yes, they support both and yes I have used in BOTH Linux and Windows server before. You can download this system at simplemachines.org
