I need to start up a small private forum. There will only be a few members at first, say 10 to 20, and I don’t seeing it get much bigger than 40 or 50 members at most. It will need to be private and invite only; Tom Chick, if you’re reading this the concept is something like the private freelancers forum we once had.
It will be simple, with several categories of discussion. Security is very important. I can’t really go into the topic, but it’s nothing illegal or immoral or “adult” related, but more of a support group and it’s important that outsiders can’t get in because many of the people will only share their real names and information with the people in the group.
Is this as simple as buying a domain name and then getting some forum software and learning to use it? No offense, but I don’t like the way this forum works, so I’d like some type of software that is more “standard” in the interface (like the old QT3, as an example.)
What do I need to know and how do I go about learning it to do this? Thanks.
Yep! Buy a domain name from your vendor of choice, buy some cheap webhosting, and point the domain name at your hosting following the instructions from the two services.
So, nice thing is that most low-cost webhosting these days is of the “cPanel instance” variety where you’re bunked up on a large webserver with other people subscribing to low-cost webhosting. When you login to your account, you’re taken to the cPanel interface, which turns a lot of the obnoxious/arcane command-line driven hosting options into a pleasant, if still somewhat “busy” graphical interface.
One of your options within there is usually a software “package manager” style program like Softaculous or Fantastico, where you pick various bits of web software–Wordpress, shopping carts, and, yes, forum software–to install on your little chunk of hosting space. Configure said forum software with your shiny new admin account using their guides/FAQs (don’t expect much help from the average webhost here) and you’re off to the races.
Depending on the exact setup you go with, you might be able to easily or not-so-easily set up things like automated backups of the forum database, automated updates of the forum software (pretty vital for security, since out-of-date forum software is a common hacking target), and similar quality of life features.
There’s other options. Managed hosting streamlines things even further, where you pay a webhost to provide you with a pre-configured site for a singular purpose. This is very popular for WordPress, but I suspect some of our webadmin users here can suggest managed hosting for forum software. There’s also things like hosting yourself (I’d recommend against it; your ISP probably forbids it and keeping all the web server software up to date and secure is a bitch), and less user-friendly hosting options that might require you to learn the command line, but might provide more “power user” features you probably aren’t terribly interested in, anyway.
Thanks, I actually have a podcast and a blog using a couple of web hosting companies, both using Wordpress. But I have no idea how to install and set up a forum software package. I was just looking at the docs for phpBB and it made my eyes glaze over!
If you’re comfortable using and updating wordpress, check out bbpress. I haven’t used it myself but it looks pretty simple.
I would have suggested a forum hosting service, but it’s surprisingly difficult to find any. I know Discourse does it, but you want a traditional forum structure. Vanilla does it too but they start at $599/month!
Have you considered something like Slack? Hard to tell from your request but maybe a private set of chatrooms like what Slack allows could be a better fit for your needs, and it’s even simpler to set things up than a forum as far as I know.
When Qt3 was migrating to Discourse, I was curious about Discourse and started to explore to set up a forum for my residents association, somewhat like a neighbouring community. Turns out Discourse + Digital Ocean ($10/month) is super easy to set up. It’s almost like a one button set up… as simple as that. If you and your community is comfortable with Discourse, I’d bet this is the easiest forum to set up.
Take a look at this instructions and see if your eyes glaze over:
Edit: oh, before you GET too excited, you gotta get the domain name first, say abc.com, then mentally fixed your forum as forum.abc.com.
I set up a forum for my RL friends at Freeforums.net. It’s ad-driven, but otherwise works like old school Qt3 or BF, and it doesn’t cost me a dime. It seems to be keeping all of our old stuff from a few years ago when I set it up, too. I only have 2 or 3 people that are really active on it, not sure how it would react with say 40 or 50 people.
Being the Azure drone that I am, I might spin up a Wordpress PaaS instance on Azure if I wanted my own blog or whatever. But then again, I’m an Azure drone.
If the Discourse/Digital Ocean approach is simple and offers the security I need, I’ll take a look at that. I personally really don"t like the way Discourse works from a user point of view, but I doubt the other people that will be on here are as heavy duty forum users as I am and thus won’t have a big problem with it. I’ll start by taking a look at that and the plug in for Wordpress since I use Wordpress for my blog and my podcast already and see which will work best. This will be a free forum (I’ll pay for the domain and hosting service but won’t ask members to pay) so I.ll need to keep the cost minimal.
I’m thinking I may start with getting my domain, signing up with MDDHosting again as my host, installing Wordpress and then simply using the bbPress plugin and see how that works.
For my podcast, I use Blubrry to host my media. For this there will be no large amounts of media, etc. I assume a forum like this won’t need more that 1Gig of disk space? (Hosting plans seem to be based on disk space, for MDDHosting you get unlimited transfer etc. and 1GB of disk space for a pretty low price; I use these guys for my podcast and like them a lot.)
OK - got a website, host (I really like Stable Host, BTW- very fast responses on help requests, inexpensive, etc. - I have used them for a number of sites) - got Wordpress installed, upgraded the PHP version, etc.
Installed bbpress and BuddyBoss, and after trying a LOT of free themes, purchased a pay theme that is set up for forums (onesocial) and has a lot of good reviews.
But I am a klutz. I feel like all thumbs trying to set up the forums to look like what I want, to do something as simple as put a Messages icon on the header (I activate it in the options, but it doesn’t show up) etc etc. For a podcast or blog, I have zero issues getting everything set up and looking like I want but this is a bit daunting. Sometihing as simple as getting my forum Heading title to display properly required adding css lines (the theme support person gave that to me) and I no nothing about css.
Is there a general set of tutorials somewhere to educate someone like me on all of this?
