Starting my own Forum

[GhostGT]

Thinking about starting my own forum; something fun and simple between friends, school mates, family, etc. Hopefully branching out into more people in the future.

I don't know much about forum software, but I do know that I like the way VBulletin works. I don't think I should jump ahead of myself and purchase a license for it already, so I've been looking at some other offers.

http://www.forumotion.com/

That's the only one I've really looked into today, as I'm tied up with some studies. Do you guys have any suggestions regarding software to use for this little hobby? Also, would I be able to, say, *upgrade* my forum from another service provider onto VBulletin in the future if I want to?

Any and all information, as always, is welcome. I'd love to get some feedback from y'all.


Cheers,

Chris

 

[berry120]

If it's just something fun and simple I'd honestly look along the free route - Phpbb is the obvious choice but there's lots of others as well. Whilst a few years ago I would've advised against free forum software for anything remotely serious in this day and age it's used pretty extensively without any issues.

Regarding to migrating to a different forum further down the line, it's possible someone might have written a script to change the database content from one site to another - but not really something to rely on. If you can get your hands on a script it will often be rather unreliable anyway, those sorts of things are generally used as an absolute last resort. That's why it's so important to make an informed choice to start with rather than regret something later down the line!

 

[David Lindon]

Yes vbulletin has many import scripts available, but make sure you free host will provide you with a db dump of the forum - some don't as they want you to upgrade to their paid service

 

[Tommy Boy]

There is a lot of good free forum software out there, you don't HAVE to pay for vbulletin to get a nice forum. I know that PHPBB has themes that look just like vbulletin, and I'm sure that others do too.

If it's going to be a small, friends and family forum, I'd say go free all the way.

 

[GhostGT]

Sounds good guys. Thanks for the information. I'll look into this a little more when I get home tonight.