Forum Creation! + Newsletter stuff!

First post, Hurray! Just wondering how forums like this are made. I would like to have forum.### for my website. Are all these forums made or paid for. If so, on what programs, and do you just buy the forum.### address or is it automatically yours (Just a bit of a noob)

The otherthing, the guy who made my site set up a newsletter. Currently you input your name and email address, and the website sends me an email with the subscribers email address, name and ip address. I then have to write out a confirmation email to them, aswell as add them to the address book. Is there a way of having some kind of program that will check for emails every (say) 5 minuites and then automatically send them a confirmation email and add them to the address book. I have downloaded a tonne of email software and the closest I can get is "eNewsletter Manager v22 which does this to some extent, but unless the email is sent directly form that persons account, will not regognise the writting in the body of the email. Only the email saying it is from 'king@panda.com' and adding email address.

I feel I have not explained very well, if you ould like I can retry...

There are free forums available (such as phpBB) but there are also ones you can pay for (such as vBulletin, which is used here at Dev Shed). Once you've bought or found a free one, you'll get some code (quite often PHP) which you upload to your server (so you need to sort out the domain etc yourself). Then you run a web based install, get access to a admincp and you can start your own forums.

Is there any templates out there for forums?
What is the best code type for forums?
any help would be much appreciate it.

It depends on what forum software you're using. I use vBulletin and there are some templates at www.vbulletintemplates.com, although I'm sure there are lots of other sites if you search a bit.



Not really sure exactly what you're asking, but most forums use PHP I think.