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[Virtualeclipse]

Well I have a site and i want forums on it. My friend(from England, I dont know him I juss play unreal tournament with him) has forums on his site. Where the hell U Get em. I need a link or something. And when I went to download.com i downloaded like 4 forum makers. They were hard to understand. Please help.

[Daedaelus]

There are hundreds of places to get forum software. Literally: HUNDREDS. PS2Fantasy uses a software called vBulletin, but it is not free. I think the owned license is $160. You can also download Invision Board, which is free software. XMB is another one, and YaBB is good as well.

Now, you do have to know a small amount of MySQL knowledge to get your forum working. You will need to be able to modify PHP files (If you go with Invision Board, or vBulletin, or YaBB), and you have to know how to create a MySQL database, and add a database user to it.

[Spank-A-Thon]

Originally posted by Daedaelus

There are hundreds of places to get forum software. Literally: HUNDREDS. PS2Fantasy uses a software called vBulletin, but it is not free. I think the owned license is $160. You can also download Invision Board, which is free software. XMB is another one, and YaBB is good as well.

Now, you do have to know a small amount of MySQL knowledge to get your forum working. You will need to be able to modify PHP files (If you go with Invision Board, or vBulletin, or YaBB), and you have to know how to create a MySQL database, and add a database user to it.

To follow on from Daedaelus' advice:

Do you know what your hosting environment is? Is it a Windows solution? Is it a variant of *nix or BSD? In either case, do you have database support? If so what type? Is is M$ Access or SQL Server for Win, or MySQL for *nix?

Depending on your server environment, you can go for either an ASP or PHP-based forum (we'll ignore JSP, not many ISPs offer that).

For Win/ASP servers I would suggest Snitz Forums. Nice and easy to set up, free and pretty feature packed.

For *nix/PHP/MySQL solutions I would not hesistate in recommending phpBB. Not only is it free, but it's very good, lots of features and skinable too.

I personally have phpBB installed on my own website and have also installed many instances of Snitz through work. I honestly haven't seen any free forum s/ware that is better than these two.

- S

[Chara]

Erm... yea. Not much to follow up on.

Vbulliten is quite possible the best forum software out there. But as Daedaelus said its not cheap at all. But you get what you pay for. Its much faster than other forum software and has the best customer support. You can pirate a copy, of course but you wont get the coustomer support that you would since you will have no member ID so you will be in the dark about many things.

I have also used phpBB (its the one I use for my site in my sig). Its the best free solution out there. My only main gripe is that a lot of the things are manual with it. For example if you want to like change some of the forum's text or add something of your own you are gonna have to go and change muliple files because of the way they have things skinned. Its also a tad slower than other forums.

But those are for if you have php and a sql database installed on your server. I think vBulliten has a cgi version also but I'm not sure.

If you have a good host there should be already a forum ready for your disposal. My host had xmb already there for me but I didnt choose it because I wasnt that familiar with it.

And yea, as Daedaelus said it would be nice to have some php and mySQL knowledge when installing and running one of them. I had to go into the database directly to fix a few problems a couple of times.

[Virtualeclipse]

Thanks a lot guys.

[Daedaelus]

Originally posted by Chara

I had to go into the database directly to fix a few problems a couple of times.

That reminds me. I can't stress this enough: MAKE SURE you install phpMyAdmin on your server, if it is not already there.

It becomes so much easier to run MySQL queries, and it will definetly save your ass a couple times. Oh, and it makes backing up your database a lot easier.