Have you ever built / used a forum if so what? and what did you like about it?

I use discourse as a support forum for a couple of my apps, and it works out very well. One of the big advantages over the more traditional phpbb type forums is that it’s more forgiving when you’re starting out and have only a small number of topics. A seeded list of 15 or so topics doesn’t look like an empty forum.

I use discoursehosting.com, a paid service to manage it so I don’t have to worry about hosting or upgrades and such.

A number of years ago I built a simple forum from scratch in PHP for my brother who raised fancy poultry in Ireland. In the space of a few months it grew locally to just under a million page loads a day — all on a shared hosting package that cost about €70 a year.

The user base was as untechnical as they come. Many of them could barely type, but the forum was so easy to use everyone managed to work out how to post and comment. We sold it a couple of years later as there was no revenue to generate from it and it was time consuming to run and police — too many fights breaking out amongst all those farmers from the hills.

Off the shelf forum software is filled with complexity. They tend to be feature heavy and try to satisfy all use cases. Microsoft Word instead of Notepad. There’s a lot to be said for a minimalist forum with little structure. The poultry forum I mentioned above didn’t even allow for embedded images, but that made no difference to the users. It was the community that was important to them, not the software.

Say something nice to georgeaffield…

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I use discourse as a support forum for a couple of my apps, and it works out very well. One of the big advantages over the more traditional phpbb type forums is that it’s more forgiving when you’re starting out and have only a small number of topics. A seeded list of 15 or so topics doesn’t look like an empty forum.

I use discoursehosting.com, a paid service to manage it so I don’t have to worry about hosting or upgrades and such.

A number of years ago I built a simple forum from scratch in PHP for my brother who raised fancy poultry in Ireland. In the space of a few months it grew locally to just under a million page loads a day — all on a shared hosting package that cost about €70 a year.

The user base was as untechnical as they come. Many of them could barely type, but the forum was so easy to use everyone managed to work out how to post and comment. We sold it a couple of years later as there was no revenue to generate from it and it was time consuming to run and police — too many fights breaking out amongst all those farmers from the hills.

Off the shelf forum software is filled with complexity. They tend to be feature heavy and try to satisfy all use cases. Microsoft Word instead of Notepad. There’s a lot to be said for a minimalist forum with little structure. The poultry forum I mentioned above didn’t even allow for embedded images, but that made no difference to the users. It was the community that was important to them, not the software.

DarrenDev

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6 years ago
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