Hey, everybody. I'm in need for some software to run a horum on my church website.
I would like to know if there are some avaliable as free and what would cost to buy some. Also the requirement would be that it has to be able to work in English for most of USA, UK and AU, also for some users in Russian for former USSR countries.

Also I would like to know how difficult is to maintain them. I never program forums before, but willing to do and learn what ever it takes to do so. We thinking about putting up the separate server for it. I would like to know what kind of software I would have to use for forum, security, firewall, OS (the best)..


Thanks a lot.
Paul

 

phpBB is the best free one i've come across.

 

vBulletin and Invision Power Board seem to be the most popular for-sale packages. I run a site with vBulletin and its a nightmare to get running properly, but pretty easy to maintain after that. I'm registered on one site that uses Invision Power Board and I find that some of the features are simply broken.

phpBB is free. I don't know anything else about it.

phpnuke is pretty cool, and really easy to set up, but may not be what you're looking for.

The site I run is on a server running Debian Linux, mysql and postgres databases, Apache with mod_php among others, and sshd (no incoming telnet connections or ftp connections). It is not behind a firewall, but Debian has some pretty cutting-edge security packages, so I'm not worried about it.

If you don't know linux and you don't know how to run a database and you don't know how to set up Apache, this could take you a couple of months, especially if it isn't your full-time job. You might be better finding a web hosting company that provides all of these things for you. Anyone on HAN do this stuff for a living?

 

:werd:

phpBB for a free forum, vBulletin for a pay forum.

 

:werd:

free, tons of mods for it...themes, runs good..

http://forums.sicracing.com <-- i use it.

http://www.phpbbhacks.com <-- tons of shit for it.

 

FREE: There's only one good choice, a winner hands down: PHPBB. I hate it; however, if I had to do something at no cost, it's the obvious choice. A lot of features for free board software. The hosting is usually going to cost more than the software, so I'd counsel paying for better software unless your parish council absolutely forbids it or something.

Not Free:

(1)ZeroForum: Modern, lightweight, very speedy compared to anything else. This is far and away my favourite. Whatever feature you need, it has it, but it's much faster than anything else. The owners of this software insist on also hosting the boards that run the software...which is great for some people, and impossible for others.

If you don't know anything about it, visit http://www.rely.net/zeroforum.php for more information.

(2)VBulletin: Very clunky compared to ZeroForum, but more features than anything else. The administration of vBulletin is not as intuitive as the administration of ZeroForum, IMHO...but it definitely has a hell of a lot of features.