Creating personal forum

requiem1

Hi All,

I'm looking to create my own forum as a way of communicating with family and friend who are across the world, as some don't want to go down the social network route. Is there an easy and free site that anybody has used and would recommend?

Thanks,

Req

Eoin

Something like this might do the trick: http://excoboard.com (I just googled for "free private forum")

But forums tend to die a death unless there's a decent amount of active contributors. You might find that something as basic as a mailing list for your family might be the way to go.

requiem1

Eoin wrote: »

Something like this might do the trick: http://excoboard.com (I just googled for "free private forum")

But forums tend to die a death unless there's a decent amount of active contributors. You might find that something as basic as a mailing list for your family might be the way to go.

Thanks for the repsonse mate,

We've been working off a mailing list for the last while now but most on the list are using their work email as they don't have access to gmail, hotmail etc. And now some are getting very conscious of the IT department seeing their emails so thats why I was considering moving to a forum on a non-conspicuous domain name, I'd even consider hosting it on my own media server at home.

I had googled free forum hosting but there was a fair few options and I knew nothing about any of them but I'll check out the link. Do you know what the most common forum platform is?

Eoin

phpBB isn't bad and it's free. It's often included as an option in many hosting packages, so you just have to click a few buttons to install it from your hosting control panel.

It might be worth while seeing if someone can recommend a very simple and lightweight package though, so it's as easy to use as possible.

I wouldn't host it from home. Your broadband TOS might not allow it, and hosting is so cheap these days that it's probably just easier to have someone else worry about bandwidth and so on.

We can't recommend specific hosting companies here by the way, but you might not even need a domain name. You could just sign up to a hosting company, and your URL would probably be something like:

www.HostingCompanyName.com/~requiem1

Hoku

phpBB actually offer free forum hosting themselves. What you can do with the forum is fairly limited, since you don't get access to the actual files, but it does the job for absolutely free.
Might not be AS private as you might want, but a quick look through the permissions section in the admin panel would fix that.

From what I understand, you can even alias a proper domain name on top of the free yoursubdomain.phpbb.net

InvisionFree also offer free forum hosting, but that version isn't quite as user friendly as the current version of phpBB (but that's just my opinion).

Scotty #

Communicating with family and friends across the world....?

Is Facebook not perfect for that?