[HELP] Setting up a Forum

Depends on whether you have any experience whatsoever setting up a website.

If you've ever set up a website before and plan on getting your own domain, etc., I'd go with phpBB. It's free, open source, and pretty well supported.


If you don't know what any of that means and you just want to get a forum started, I'd go with ProBoards.com. You get start up a forum for free on someone else's domain and set yourself up as an administrator.

I've done both, and they are both pretty good solutions depending on how far into it you want to go.

 

For what it's worth, this forum uses vBulletin - which is NOT free - but it's in the same ballpark as phpBB.

 

Duh. That includes sharing profits from your job. I'll email you my bank info - we can set up direct deposit.

 

No you don't need to share profits with ProBoards.

It will have ads, though, unless you pay a monthly service fee of some kind. (don't know what it is these days)

 

You mean you wanted to make money because from the ads?

I've had my own forum with Google ads with about 2000 registered members before, and the ad revenue was never more than $20 a month.

It's not really a money maker when you consider the time investment. At best, it just helps to offset some of the costs associated with the site.

Other people may have different experiences.

 

Yeah if you want to put your own ads on it, you'll have to go with phpBB or vBulletin or something like that.

And you'll have to set up your own domain ($10/year) and rent some webspace (around $5-10/month when you're starting out), etc.

But honestly, you're probably not going to be making money out of the chute, and even once you get going, you're just going to be offsetting some costs.

 

Yeah... for anyone who has any kind of experience setting up a website, starting up a phpBB forum should be simple stuff.

 

Take a shot at affiliate marketing.

 

I actually did that for a while, but I shut the site down a couple of years ago. It basically became obsolete with facebook.

 

phpbb and mybb are both free and have their pros and cons but both are pretty good to work with

 

I ran a everquest message board for a number of years with phpbb, it was pretty easy to setup an there is alot of documentation out there for additional features.

Alot of places that do web hosting have build in support for phpbb as well as a few other common ones, in all seriousness it shoudnt take more than a couple hours to setup with minimal experience.