Creating Your Own Forum (Web Sites)

So you want to create your own forum. You’ve seen others (maybe the PCMech forums?) and thought “Hey that’s a good idea, I could use one of those.” After doing some quick research you probably found out that setting one up is a huge pain in the rump.

Not to worry, here’s the 101 on how to get yourself a forum. Setting up a forum on your website is a great way to provide some interactivity to your site which keeps people coming back for more.

Using a Free Forum Hosting Service

Difficulty: Easy
Web site required: No

Here are a few examples of free forum hosting services.

• ForumUp
• Forumotion
• MakeForum
• FreeForums

This is a very small list of the free forums available. There are tons more. You basically just pick the one you like and go with it. Your forum site address will be usually a subdomain such as [you].whatever-forum-service.site and activates immediately upon registration.

When activated you can link it from anywhere. From your blog, from your social media page (MySpace, Facebook, etc.) or wherever you like.

Known issues:

The largest issue everyone hates about free forums is the ads. Some offer some kind of paid option to remove them but most consider it a waste of money.

The second largest issue is that sometimes a free forum hosting service will start to operate very slowly for no reason periodically. And there’s basically nothing you can do about it.

Using a Paid Hosting Auto-Installer

Difficulty: Medium

If you already pay to host your own web site there is most likely the option in your hoster’s control panel to auto-install a forum for you. This will take care of all the dirty work, set up the database and so on. All you have to do is pick the location of where you want the forum to go on your site (such as example.com/forum).

You do have to be aware of how to get into your web host’s control panel for your account. Depending on how it’s set up determines how long it will take for you to get your forum up and running.

Known issues:

The auto-installer via your web host provider usually never installs the latest version of whatever forum software it uses. Ordinarily it’s at least a few versions behind. Granted, there will be patches/upgrades that eventually come around but it’s usually a “too little too late” way of doing it.

Installing a Forum Yourself On Your Paid-Hosting Web Site

Difficulty: Expert

This is by far the best way to get a forum running because it offers you the most choice, the most custom options and the most “behind the scenes” options as well.

You have 2 options when it comes to self-installed forums. You can either use a flat file based system or a MySQL database. (Yes I know there are several flavors of SQL, but generally speaking most are going to use MySQL.)

Here are a few examples of forum software you may want to check out.

• YaBB has been around a long, long time. It is a Perl based forum system and one of the extreme few that doesn’t use SQL as its database back-end. For those that don’t have MySQL capability on their web host, this is a decent forum system to use. It has stood the test of time and is continually updated to this day. The installation documentation provided is very straightforward and easy to follow. YaBB is free.
• phpBB is widely regarded as the most used forum system on the internet. This uses a MySQL database back-end and has proven rock-solid reliability. If you’re going to use this it’s highly suggested you use the latest version because prior versions were nothing but spam magnets. The ease of installation is not as easy as it used to be concerning phpBB, but if you persevere you can get this installed. phpBB is free.
• SMF (Simple Machines Forum) started off as a MySQL version of YaBB but then evolved into the system it is now. SMF is free.
• punBB is admittedly one of my favorite forum systems because it’s purposely designed to be lightweight. This is a lightning fast forum, has great support and operates beautifully. punBB is free.
• Invision Power Power, a.k.a. IP.Board is a paid system. Although touted as one of the best feature-packed forum systems available, rarely have I seen them on the internet. Their site is very corporate and they aim primarily for corporate customers.
• vBulletin is the system the PCMech Forums use and is a paid system. It is widely known to have unbelievably rock-solid reliability and is one of the oldest most trusted forum systems on the internet. I only recommend this software to those who get massive amounts of traffic to their web site otherwise you’d probably find it painful to pay $180 for a license. Yes it does cost that much but as any vBulletin user will tell you, it’s worth it.

Things You Need To Know About Self-Hosting:

1. The ability to manually edit configuration files with a text editor.

Notepad is good but Notepad++ is better (and free). Many forum software titles require you to manually edit some configuration files prior to installation.

2. Know how to use an FTP program to push files to your site.

The program you need: Filezilla.

If the forum software you use requires you to set file permissions via CHMOD‘ing, Filezilla is the easiest way to do it (i.e. right click, File Attributes..)

3. Know how to get to phpMyAdmin

You’re most likely going to use a forum system that requires a MySQL database. Creating the database via your web host’s control panel is easy enough, but you should also know how to access this database via phpMyAdmin. ALL paid web host providers that offer MySQL have phpMyAdmin installed and accessible via the control panel.

Why do you need to know phpMyAdmin? Because it’s the easiest way to perform a COMPLETE backup of your MySQL database. You do this via an “export to file” in phpMyAdmin. When the time comes that you have to upgrade your forum there may be an instance where it breaks. If you don’t have a backup, you’re screwed.

When you install a forum yourself for the first time…

You will hate it. Guaranteed. It’s not easy and never has been. However it is totally worth it to go thru the pains of install to figure out how this stuff works. As a webmaster you are better off knowing this information. Also, once installed you’ll get a great feeling of accomplishment because said honestly, most people don’t go this route because they deem it too difficult.