I am planning on starting / creating a forum. The forum is going to be geared towards accounting studies. It's pretty much a small personalized place where me and other students from my classes can discuss assignments, tests, etc.
I felt that there is a need for such a place since I always get bothered by other students asking for help in their studies. They email, call, or stop me in the hallway to ask questions. Hopefully, creating such a place will make them help each other or have the prof take care some of the questions.
I plan on posting hints, tips, tricks to help them on the assignments. I plan to keep the forums legit like no public posting of wares, cheats, and even answers to assigned work.
I pitched the idea over to some of my professors and classmates. Both groups seem to like the idea.
This is the 1st time I am going to attempt such a task so any pointers (no matter how insignificant they seem to be) you can offer are greatly (needed) appreciated. I plan to keep the costs of installation and upkeep to zero. I already have to donate my precious time on coding and policing the forum.
I did some basic research and I've pretty much decided on the freeware version of invision power board. Unless you have a better suggestion, I guess I'll use that as the platform for the board. Any links on how to install / mod the software are more than welcome.
For the webhost, I'm planning on using the free host that I have now. I might think of getting another host since the site have some downtime. But I'll wait to see if people actually use it and if the forums are active enough. Any good hosting sites you can recommend (both free and pay)?
I also plan on registering a domain name for easy access to the site. As I mentioned, I'll be using a free webhost. Most of the times, I have to type a long URL to access my pages. Besides, I've been thinking of registering a domain name for myself. I was planning on registering a variation of "james." It should be short and easy to remember. Any suggestions on what the domain name should be? I am hinting towards james8547.com (nobody better register this name and then try to sell it to me later
).