Best free message board?

Hey. I am looking for a free message board for my Unreal Tournament 2004 clan. I am currently making a website for my clan using homestead sitebuilder. I need a forum that is free. It needs to change the color of the forum it self. Basiclk people just need to log in and post message. And certian members can have adminasration rights.

Try phpBB.

It's free and I know of a lot of extremely popular web forums that use it.

cool. Looks nice. Do you know if i will be able to get this to work on homestead sitebuilder?

I'm not familiar with homestead sitebuilder. But it should work on any host that has PHP 4 enabled.

Or you could try IPB

Ill stick with PHPBB. It looks nice + its free. Homestead doesnt support PHP turns out... But im pretty sure I can get someone on the net that will help me host my 30 member forum board for free.

This thread might help you...

http://forums.devshed.com/t138228/s.html

Cool. Im gonna use IPB Gonna go play with it now.

Hehe - good luck with it

phpbb sucks :P http://www.invisionboard.com/ rules but it has a licencing stuff, although theres free trial version with the following differences:

- Absolutely no technical support, including installation assistance, is provided for the free trial download. Technical support is provided for those purchasing the software by email, live chat, and telephone 365 days a year.

- Your forum, although perfectly functional, will display a small notice at the bottom of the page that it is a free trial download.

- Certain advanced features of the software (subscriptions manager, spell checker, chat service, etc.) may not be available in the free trial option as these require additional modules to operate that are only available to licence holders.

- You can purchase a license to Invision Power Board at any time to download addons and request support and the upgrade from the free trial version is quick and easy.

Hi,

Why is IPB better than phpBB? I'm using phpBB. I notice this board uses vB. I understand the majority of forums out there use phpBB (probably because it's free).

Thanks,

Art

Actually, in my experience, most forums use IPB. IPB is free, and has superior adminidstrative and member management features, many more built in features, and is the nearest thing to vBullitin that is free. phpBB is sucky. But it might be OK for just a small forum.

I always said to myself that I would only use free message boards, but as you get more and more users, free message boards like phpBB are such a drag for mass user changes.

You need to spend ages on modifiying your message board for more users, I learned that making the site look slightly like what it did before, but adding your own look attracts a lot of new members to your site. Believe me, modifiying phpbb to look the way you want it makes you feel almost suicidal, I wanted a navigation bar on my site and a different title etc, it took me over 40 template editsand even then I had problems.

I would recommmend using vBulletin, it gives your users so many more options, and there are hundreds of A4 pages of vbulletin options in the control panel for ranks, settings, styles, users, usergroups, maintenance and more. My site has been running since November 2003, after getting vbulletin, which cost me £47 for a year at the time, the amount of users up to March 2004 DOUBLED in one month, because users are given so many options and it is so easy to get it to look the way you want.

If you want a cheap host and good message board, go to www.binasys.co.uk for hosting and www.vbulletin.com for message board. Even at the age of 16, I have had no problems with money when it comes to running my site, and im very very very happy with my web host. I pay £14.99 a month for 400MB space, 20GB bandwidth, 10 mySQL, 200 email accounts, 50 subdomains etc. And I am going to upgrade my license for vbulletin to owned when I get nearer to the expiry date .

My site is located at www.collegepranks.co.uk. There is a link in the top left to the actual forums, but its all there for you to look at, and ask any questions if you need.

Cheers,
Dan