Forum software

balibule

[USER=1]@admin[/USER]

balibule

I'm planning on starting a forum. Not Bali related, not even Indonesia related. I see that vBulletin is a paid software. I am looking at starting of on a free software like phpBB or BBpress on WordPress. If anyone has previous experience on running a forum I'd be glad to hear from you what you would have done different or what things to avoid.

bp-admin

It depends I suppose on what features you want. There is a list here of some of the different software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Internet_forum_software Spam and security would be my biggest concerns. BBpress is good if you are also going to have a blog and I think it is made by the core WP team. I heard it lacks some of the features of other forums. Xenforo is paid but looks good and is actively being developed. How about a facebook group?

balibule

Thank you. I have a few websites already. One is getting between 23 - 25k views a month but the others are still early stages. I want to have a go at a forum in a niche I am involved with. I'd like to ultimately monetize the forum as I've been doing with the other sites. This is why facebook is a no starter. vBulletin and Xenforo both look great but are paying options. I will likely go for phpBB and if it goes well I can still move to vBulletin or Xenforo. Next challenge will be getting traffic to a forum as quiet as a cemetery.

bp-admin

Make sure you check out what spam controls you can implement right from the start. The difficulty is stopping the spambots while still allowing genuine members to join.

balibule

Thanks, I am getting curious now. You don't have to answer but does Balipod get to deal with lots of spambots? A simple captcha should solve that right?

geedee

When you do it please make it mobile friendly i have trouble with Ipad and Iphone you cant really get the activity you have to do one thread at a time to look for recent activity. A hell of a lot of people only use these devices for internet

balibule

According to this forum post vBulletin (Balipod) seems to have an option to be mobile friendly. No idea if it would work here though. Mobile Friendly Mode? - vBulletin Community Forum