Building a forum advice

[SaphTalon]

I am thinking about building a forum for mlp. My goal is going to be creating an enviornment for spiritual growth. I wont go into detail as the rules clearly say that religion is not to be in our conversations on here.

I am just wanting to know if there is any already on the web and if not I would like to know if it is possable to creat one within two or three years. By then I will have the steady income to get it put on a server and have high enough spead conection to handle all the hits. With that amount of time I will be able to learn HTML. I am studying micro programming so it should not be hard to go from program coding to web design.

Advice?

[nudging this over to Off topic for you - kiwimlp]

[Malancaiwen]

I think if you create such a forum, talking about religion/spirituality, you might need a strong and coherent mods team as this kind of subject can easily bring fights :/

A good community sharing the same ideas would be a lovely place though!

[RAMChYLD]

Well, if you want to create a forum, you have two options: Getting a prefabricated forum from sites like ProBoards, or renting a VPS (or an Amazon cloud) and building your own from scratch. Since you're already learning programming, building your own from scratch isn't too hard- the problem is the vast choice of Forum Software. Personally, I'd suggest PhpBB- it's free and most Linux distros have it pre-packaged in their repository. All you need to know is how to install packages on your distribution of choice. And of course, how you're going to deal with the monthly bills.

ProBoards, on the other hand, is easier to set up- just sign up and you can skip all the system configuration stuff and get straight down to the forum stuff. On the other hand it can be quire restrictive- they don't admit minors below the age of 12, period.

That said, like Malancaiwen said, you'll need strong and coherent mods, assuming this isn't a one-man show forum. Good luck!

[Eviecorn]

Hope you find what you need!

[tulagirl]

I had my own forum, but I picked one that had templates and things. I never had to deal with the things you describe with mine.  So I guess I wouldn't be much help.  Just be aware of the legal issues involved in owning a forum as you are responsible for those.

[SaphTalon]

Really I want to design from scratch. How is  PhpBB different than a HTML editor. I remember working with Microsoft front page in high school.

That may be out of date but you get my point. I am also going to have (I think) what my mother called a case worker for my goals in life being that one of them is going to college so I may find a way.

The thing is am having a hard time finding software that has the ability to build a forum and maintain it. I know the word free does not apply here but I need to know exactly what software to buy or do I need to wait till I take a web design class to know what software they are using.

[RAMChYLD]

Really I want to design from scratch. How is  PhpBB different than a HTML editor.

Well, the thing about forums is that they're way more complicated than static HTML pages (which is what Frontpage does). They're comprised of dynamically generated webpages- special pages made up primarily of the PHP programming language and Javascript- and a database (typically MySQL or PostgreSQL) backend.

The thing is am having a hard time finding software that has the ability to build a forum and maintain it. I know the word free does not apply here but I need to know exactly what software to buy or do I need to wait till I take a web design class to know what software they are using.

Ok. I understand now. PhpBB (www.phpbb.com) is indeed what you're looking for- you just deploy it on an *AMP (<insert OS here>-Apache-MySQL-PHP) server, go into the admin panel, and build your forums from there. It has a few dependencies, but they shouldn't be too trivial to install, especially if you're running a linux distribution (some linux distributions' package managers will even install them for you if PhpBB is available on the distro's repository and you use the package manager to deploy PhpBB).

If you do mind the theme tho, there are dozens of pre-made themes ("styles") you can download from the PhpBB website, but if you want to get down and dirty and build your own, then it gets tricky.

Good luck, and let me know if you need any more help!