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Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?
First time accepted submitter DustyMurray writes "I am considering adding forums to my website, and am just getting confused by all the options. My first reaction is always DIY. You get better website integration, and it looks and feels 100% how you want it to look and feel. However looking at things like phpBB and Vanilla forums, I will be hard pressed to build a better user experience in a reasonable amount of time. Also these out-of-the-box solutions seem to be shouting 'Easy to integrate with your website.' So, considering this, how easy are these ready build forums really to integrate? I want to be able to insert stuff on certain pages, so it's not either the forums, or my site... It must be a mix. I do not want a second login system on my site. And last but not least, I definitely don't want to have this typical generic look that most forums sport. Can all that be delivered with the out-of-the-box forums that exist today? Which one is the most flexible regarding these wishes?"
I would say that vBulletin is your best choice. It has a huge amount of features you're going to love.
Seriously, building something like vBulletin would take you years with all the front-end and admin panel features. It is also customizable to every site so that it can look the same as your site (but maintains the usability users have adjusted to on other sites). This is also performance thing apart from features - you most likely lack the knowledge to make high performance forum as good as vBulletin guys have.
I've seen large sites that have connected their website with vBulletin, so it is possible. Not only that, but vBulletin actually has vBulletin Connect that lets you build your website around vBulletin. Some CMS (Content Management Systems) also support vBulletin directly.
One specific large site I use daily did convert from their proprietary system they had used for more than 10 years. vBulletin was their choice, and while it did take a few months to convert that old system, the forum now works much better and supports way more features that users like. If you are making a new site you can obviously do it correctly the first time and skip the conversion.
If you are doing this as work for a professional site, I would stay away from phpBB and other free solutions. While it's possible to use them, you don't get any support and they're hard to integrate exactly the way you want to. They also tend to lack on the features that something like vBulletin has.
vBulletin really is your best choice. It's a little pricy, but for what you get the price is more than justified.
They arn't particularly easy to modify without making them hard to update. And updated common web software like that makes you an easy mark for hackers once they put out the next revision. I record all the 404s to our website and you would be surprised how many go to addresses of admin pages on things like WordPress. So if you do go that route to save time, but it on a different box and make it a priority to keep up to date.
Writing forum code is time consuming and dull.
There are plenty of perfectly fine open source options.
Last time I used JForum which is fine although they have no idea how Java's exception handling works.
Should you add a forum to a web site? Are you ready to moderate it, defend it against spammers and irate users, manage lost passwords and deal with intellectual property disputes? A forum doesn't sleep, a forum doesn't go on holiday.
Having done all of this a couple of times: No, it can't all be delivered with an out of the box forum. So what you do is pick the simplest one which offers most of the stuff you don't want to develop yourself, with the least-byzantine code, and then you make it yours. Rip out its authentication infrastructure, see if you can work with its templating solution or substitute your own, etc. PunBB has been my go-to forum for this reason in the past; though I'm no particular fan of its rather outdated coding style, it's at least very readable and easy to get started with, something which definitely can't be said of phpBB.
Drupal core forum combined with the advanced forum will meet your requirements. We used this approach for IFC, see it here.
sysadmins and parents of newborns get the same amount of sleep.
...what you may have to deal with.... This forum board has been closed for quite some time and still I get tons of registrations....
http://abstractionphysics.net/phpBB2/
Maybe consider contributing to a honeypot should you chose to pursue a forum. https://www.projecthoneypot.org/
Take all the recommendations you get here ...and then:
(1) Get the number of CERT advisories for each of them
(2) Get the percentage market share of each one of them
(3) Calculate (#2 * 100) / #1
(4) Whoever is left with the largest number, pick that one
For example, the calculation above for bbPress, which is a WordPress plugin, would also need to take into account the number of WordPress only CERT advisories, plus those for any plugins besides bbPress you felt it necessary to use, and the resulting number would let you write off using bbPress. Likewise, anything that used Java as an implementation detail would probably get written off due to the number of security holes which have been found in Java. Anything with an SQL back end would have to take into account SQL injections for the other components you intended to use, and so forth.
Ideally, you would probably put your forums on an isolated machine, rather than hosting everything on one machine, which would drastically reduce the attack surface -- and this would become pretty crystal clear to you after you performed the calculation exercise.
In the last decade I was using Invision forum software not only because it was a very nice alternative to vbulletin and phpBB but it also seemed quite popular as well. They do have a demo for the Community Suite here - http://www.invisionpower.com/demo/ if you want to try it out.
You must master your joystick like a fisherman masters bait! - Gimpy
I've set up several forums on my home server and I co-admin on a professional forum. The pro forums are running UBB Threads. Great software, but a little limiting. For my forums, I run phpBB. The software is easy to install, easy to upgrade and easy to mess around with. There are "mods" for practically any feature you'd want to add and with the easy integration, it's as simple as pointing the control panel to the installation file for the mod you want. Their forums are top notch and pretty much any questions you may have are there, already answered. If not, they are quick to help out. Best of all, phpBB is completely free. One thing I'd recommend is a basic, working understanding of HTML, CSS and some PHP. If you can't program in these languages, at the very least, you'll need to be able to edit existing code if you want to change your look. However, it should be noted that there are thousands of "skins" out there, all of which can easily get you really close to the look you are going for and then minor changes (like switching out the logo) are easy. Read through the forums, have a look at some of the forums people have built and, if you want to give it a try, download it and mess around for a bit. Because it's free, if you don't like it, there is no loss!
I've used several forum softwares. In addition to the criterion you mention, a huge maintenance problem is getting spam. So also keep an eye out for forum software that uses one or more means to help you detect and remove spammy posts.
I have been bashing around several CMS over the last several years.
Any one of which would be fine to set up a Forum.
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
Pick one from the CMS Matrix and have at it.
---
I personally use Joomla but there are many with similar features.
1. We use InvisionPowerBoard IPB http://www.invisionpowerboard.com/ . It is commercial. However it comes with services like spam IP check and regularly upgrades.
2. The default skin looks very modern and my user loves it.
3. They provide very responsive support service, very important for me running a pretty busy site.
4. Our major concern about this forum product is the lack of a Mobile iOS / Android app as yet.
For this mobile era, don't overlook this, your users will demand it.
5. You can take a look at our site http://www.blowingwind.org/forum/index.php , but be warned it is a LGBT site.
So don't look if you are concerned.
...unfortunately. Facebook groups seem to be the in thing for convenience with users. That said phpBB and vBulletin are the way to go.
are you on a sheared box for you web hosting?
If so they and it's forum with a lot of users can slow things down a lot / get you kicked off.
everybody from /b/ about to attack your forums with ponies or whatever
How bout something simple like Google Groups? Excellent support for.....just about everything. Tie it up to your domain (Also excellent support to do that) and it all works.
Most of it depends on what you're after.
PhpBB has a ton of features, but is a bit slow and bulky. I feel it's easy to work with, but it's probably not the easiest out there.
VanillaForums are extremely simply but lack some features (though many of these can be "bought").
vBulletin has a lot of niceties, but can be a bit of a hog and doesn't come cheap.
There is also SMF (Simple Machine Forums) which I've been told is a cross between phpBB and Vanilla Forums, but I haven't personally used it.
If you're new to this sort of thing, go for Vanilla. It's free, extremely easy, and has a lot of nifty features out of the box.
We use ip.board from Invision and I think it looks good, we have a subsection for the forum and our main site is seperate but the membership information is combined.Look at http://punetworks.com/ and http://punetworks.com/pulounge if you want to see how we did it, its a site about cars.
Why bother rolling your own? It's like developing your own encryption algorithm - probably a bad idea. A commercial (or open source) forum suite has had way more eyes looking at it than your home-brewed solution. That being said, for $$ vBulletin is good and if you wanna go free, try phpBB 3.0.11.
I won't debate whether this is accurate or not.
I will debate(state) that putting your stuff on Facebook is good for them and bad for you. Not to mention that Facebook's "forums" suck as do most blog/CMS forums.
You could enable Facebook authentication on your forum, if you wish. But, giving them your data is stupid!
But there aren't many dupes posted on weekends and holidays
Do they no longer give away slashcode?
There are multiple very good forum software projects, and I have no clear preference. phpBB and SMF are good standalone solutions; Drupal is powerful if you're looking to have much more than a forum. LAMP (as in PHP/MySQL) is by far the most popular technology. Ruby and Python might be more stylish, but most of the PHP software has had years of continual improvement. Best get several of them (Wikipedia has a complete list) and try them out locally for comparison.
Only two things I'd recommend against:
- First, on absolutely no account try to write your own from scratch. The best projects now available have been in development for almost ten years (more in some cases). This is an extremely complex application with many pitfalls in design, database architecture, extendability, and security. If you were the best programmer in the world, it would take you months of constant testing and bugfixing before you had anything approaching stability; and you'd spend the coming years finding security holes and fixing design mistakes.
- Second, avoid commercial solutions if possible. They're not usually better. Also, you should factor in not just the purchase price but the continual costs of upgrades and user-contributed addons. One good commercial board I've worked with is IPB, but that's only in recent versions after years of development - and I still prefer phpBB.
For the love of all that is Geek, don't do it!
Web forums suck so hard. They don't work nearly as well as mailing lists did.
..."better website integration"
This guy/gal has posted no comments here. Both his/her submissions link a very suspicious site.
All this sounds like a nascent spammer to me.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Whatever route you take, be sure to use user's existing login, if there is one, for forum access.
No example of poor website planning has annoyed me more over the years than websites that make me sign up for a second account for the forums because they are not integrated.
At www.bzflag.org we have a 3 way login for the website, forums and in game authentication that works flawlessly for us. Go to http://www.bzflag.org/ for the main page and to http://forums.bzflag.org/ for the forums. Our game clients are directly tied to the PhBB user database; no extra authentication needed.
I use Vanilla forums on bankofamericasucks.com and have for about 2 years switched from phpBB because it was always getting hacked and needing to be patched every week. Vanilla was easy to customize as far as the look, and is super simple to keep up with and manage.
It beats the pants off of vBulletin in many, many ways. First of all, the original developers are still working on the product. It has gone through many revisions and huge code changes. vBulletin at its core is a very dated piece of software.
The extensibility in IPB is better. They have a feature called IPConnect that allows you to integrate different authentication points. They have a shopping cart program called Nexus, Blogs, and a CMS that's pretty good though takes some effort to figure out (IP Content).
It runs fast, it's a clean setup, easy to administer and there are plenty of plugins and skins for it as well.
Take a look, many, many people switched from vBulletin to IPB.
The price is always right if someone else is paying.
If you are feeling brave check out some of the stuff on the https://www.ruby-toolbox.com. Set it up with phusion passenger and apache and you are good to go. Of course you'd have to learn Rails, but still you can customize some of the forum solutions on that site to the nth degree. If you are using an existing login say with OpenID for example, you could just setup OmniAuth and it should just read the cookies from an existing session. I love RoR.
Post a link to each page on reddit, and then update the page with a link to the reddit discussion about it...
Since several recommendations above are about PHP projects, (SMF, phpBB, Drupal, Wordpress etc) I think it's worth mentioning that http://www.php-fig.org/ will make integration between projects a lot easier, and it's worthwhile to look more at projects using common standards. Being able to use a common platform for a lot of boring low level stuff like dependency management, class autoloading and similar things, will make integration a great deal easier, regardless of exactly which projects you end up using.
Forums suck. Plain and simple. They are the worst group interaction mechanism out there. Mailing lists are way better.
Forums are heavy-weight -- too much graphic and bling to convey what is 99% of the time textual content. This could be said to be too low of a signal density.
Forums (usually) require polling to get updates. Yes, I know forums can "ping" you via e-mail when there is an update but at that point I am already in e-mail anyway and will need to context switch out to visit the web page the forum is at. If I am already using e-mail to get notified to go see an update, why not just do away with the low-density web-page and do all of the conversing in e-mail?
Forums typically require yet another username/password combination that I either have to memorize (yeah, right, along with the umpteen other username/passwords I don't remember) or write down or use the same as I use elsewhere, all of which are insecure.
I could go on, but I could also just short-circuit it all and say again, forums suck. They suck ass. Hard.
I recently had to select a forums solution for my company, and this site proved extremely useful: http://www.forummatrix.org/
It catalogues tons of closed and open-source forum products coded by dozens of variables, and lets you compare them in a big matrix. Very useful if you have constraints/preferences like "works with SQL server" or "isn't PHP", etc.
My main complaint about it is that some of the data are out-of-date, but it is still a great starting point.
then vBulletin is your only way to go. SMF, phpBB, Yabb.... I've seen forum owners start with all of them, and when their forum is actually successful, they end up migrating to vBulletin because it just works. The pricing is reasonable, the features are there, and so is the support, which you'll eventually need.
On the other hand, if you are just opening a small support forum for a product you sell or if you intend specifically to keep it from growing too big, then sure, look at phpBB, its pretty good.
Nobodies Prefect
Tidbits for Techs Technology Blog
I see there are a lot of suggestions about PHP-based forums, but out of curiosity, are there any forums that would match the OP's requirements but run on the JVM?
Maybe something like this..IPB? Linux Mint Serbia, http://forum.mint-srbija.com
PHP Fig
http://mylittleforum.net/ - For when you just want web forums.
look carefully at the boxed product, most have security issues you do NOT want to discover after you have integrated and launched. If you do not have UBER skills with the language used in the source - go hire someone who has hacker skills to give you an honest appraisal of the security of your choice.
No offense to the other posters, I'm sure you all have some level of confidence in what you are recommending, but some of the suggested boxed systems recommended here are so rife with holes I would not recommend you anything except vett all the code yourself or by means of a TRUSTED hacker-wise UBER-coder.
I had good luck with BuddyPress a few years ago, and I see it's still around. You may want to take a look. http://buddypress.org/
It incorporates forums (bbPress) but also many social networking features like Friends lists, groups, activity streams, private messaging, etc. It feels much more comprehensive than a forum because it offers features that social networking users have come to expect. I replaced a phpBB site with BuddyPress and wouldn't go back.
If you're going to go with a straight Forum solution, I'd go with vBulletin.
You're a dick. We should ban people from posting LMGTFY links on Slashdot just like we did on stackoverflow.
I put bbPress on my site a while back. It doesn't have all of the features of some other boards, but it is free and pretty easy to customize. I was able to integrate the logins of my site, my blog, and my boards without too much hassle.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html
My first reaction is always DIY
So, when you got your first car, you first thought was to build it yourself?
The first rule of building stuff is, Don't Reinvent the Wheel. That is especially true in software development, a field that has more than its share of really great wheelwrights.
Half u treid fasebook coments? their awsum!
FUDforum is interesting: free software, e-mail and NNTP gateways built-in. Now, that would be different and give everybody the choice of the client to use -- not to mention actual, real discussion threads that other software lack.
SMF - http://www.simplemachines.org/
what I use and with the GIGANTIC plugin support it's amazing. I never get spam problems, I have SMF set to use my wordpress logins for authentication, which means my wordpress uses Akismet to block spam therefore SMF uses it also since SMF users are set to be same as my wordpress users. Uses same database for logins.
Which sounds like what you are looking for, users log in to your website means they are logged in to both wordpress and smf with 1 account automatically.
SMF forums also have "bulletproof security" plugins similar to Wordpress that monitor sql threats, use 301 redirects and htaccess to shore up any problems it may think can happen.
course nothing is 100% but I love SMF and it's huge versatility, offers more plugins and themes than other stuff like phpbb/vbulletin. And my opinion is more secure when merged with sites like wordpress using Akismet for accounts.
I've been using Simple Machines Forum for a number of years, and although I would say that it's totally customizable, there are number of templates and adds for it, it's very stable, and has worked great for me. And it's free, although it's a always a good idea to become a through $50 a year at them and become a charter member (having said that, I think I've let my charter membership lapse at the moment!). Development seems very slow, with releases few and far between; however I'm still very pleased that I chose SMF when I went looking for forum software.
I know that Facebook offers a comment system for your site, and should be pretty easily integrated with just a few lines of Javascript. I think it's geared towards a comment list per page (news item, etc), rather than a standard forum. I expect that it also probably requires posters to use their real names, and maybe posts to their graph when they leave a comment. Depending on your site, this option could be ideal, or it could be terrible.
Are people so fucking stupid, they cant make their own educated decisions nowdays?
I notice everyone here recommends going with a stock solution. I'm going to suggest rolling your own. Yes, it's a lot more work but there are some real advantages. I used to use Wordpress and Drupal on some of my sites and I discovered that it made me a target for every script kiddie in eastern Europe and Russia. Yeah, the prebuilt packages spend lots on security but every time a hole is discovered, the whole world knows about it. Some days the majority of my traffic was hackers trying out the latest exploit against my site. If you roll your own, you may make a mistake but bad guys have to invest time in figuring out how your site works before they can use it. I figure that makes me a less inviting target. Also the "lots of features" argument doesn't work for me. Most of those features are things I will never use so it just means more documentation to wade through and things to check when things do go wrong. My idea of perfect site is one where there is not one more line of code than absolute minimum it takes to keep it running. But then I pulled the air conditioning out of my car because I didn't need it and it added weight and parasitic drag.
If it doesn't look like 4chan, don't bother, OP.
Why?
- no registration
- no karma
- no post counts
- no "member since" tag
- no user access levels
It's quite simply, the best. Post something good and attract the best.
Every time I see a forum all I find is web interfaces that are trying to imitate newsgroups. But they do it so poorly. I would give anything to have half the functionality of newsgroups in a forum. I totally understand that a web interface for nntp would cause its own problems but I have to wonder if a web interface on a nntp backend might be easier to develop than these forums that are trying to replace it's functionality.
I have wanted Slashdot to offer up a NNTP server for more than 12 years. If they did I would gladly pay them a monthly fee.
Ascii artist &
I had to use phpBB for a deep integration into a website (for example to allow users to post comments on non-forum pages with the same UX than on the forums themselves) and this was horrible, it was not at all built for this and large parts had to be rewrote or copy/pasted. So I can already advise you to not use this one given the requirements you expressed.
Now, you need to think about the end-user experience too: as an end-user I love vBulletin forums because they have all the features I like to have and I know where every setting is located. This is the good side with VBulletin being popular. I have no experience with it as a developer though.
Hi, we at dcemu use vbulletin 4 for our forums, heres a link http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/forum.php Our CMS uses the vbulletin forum but isnt quite what you need --> http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/forum.php Then our subdomain websites are normal websites but use some of the features of vbulletin, like the news feed, whos online, members etc but are totally free of that standard forum look , for example --> http://real-ales.dcemu.co.uk/
I truly dislike Web-based forums. They require the user to connect to a specific Web site, which is sometimes down. Although Facebook is rarely down, a forum based there requires users to have Facebook accounts; similar requirements exist for other forum hosting services. Threaded discussions are often difficult to follow on Web-based forums, and threads usually cannot be sorted (both are also problems with mailing lists). To find a specific topic or thread, the user must use the forum's own search capability, which is too often rudimentary and insufficient for real-world use. Then, there is the fact that some Web-based forums work well only with certain browsers.
I much prefer the newsgroups hosted by NNTP (network news transfer protocol) servers. There are several NNTP service providers (NSPs), both free and paid; users only have to use one NSP to participate even when other users use other NSPs. That is, users are not required to connect and login to any one specific site.
A number of different NNTP applications also exist, mostly freeware. Those applications generally handle threaded discussions quite well. Search capabilities are built into the applications and are not needed for the newsgroup itself. If spam, flame wars, trolls, and other problems are a concern, a moderated newsgroup is also possible.
If your topic is limited, I would suggest creating an alt.* newsgroup. See the text document at http://ftp.isc.org/pub/usenet/CONFIG/README. However, many NSPs no longer host alt.* newsgroups because so many of them contained child pornography.
If your topic might have broad public appeal, you might consider creating a newsgroup under one of comp.*, news.*, sci.*, humanities.*, rec.*, soc.*, talk.*, or misc.*. See http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Main_Page.
A moderated newsgroup can have more than a single moderator, which would be appropriate if your forum is not related to your own personal Web site. See http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/faqs/mod-pitfalls.html for the negatives of moderated newsgroups. The "Moderator's Handbook" at http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/usefor/other/moderators-handbook is quite old but still useful. See also http://www.big-8.org/wiki/Changing_Moderation_Status.
If you choose to DIY, it may interest you to take a look at Steve Huffman's (Reddit) at Udacity : CS253 How to Build a Blog. Sure, a blog is not a forum but they share some key elements. Steve uses Google App Engine as the server and codes in Python and Jinja2.
I wanted to add a forum to my site. My requirements were a bit different than yours:
- I didn't care much about the look and feel integration.
- My focus was free and low maintenance.
- I don't have user account registering on my website, which lead to spam on the forums I tried,
I ended up with the website linking directly to a Facebook page I made for it. It looks a bit like a hack job, but one that has been working really well for me.
i recently wrote my own forum software in php. it was relatively basic, but had features such as reply/quote, new topic, stickies, lock topic, delete post/topic (but doesn't really delete, just hides it from regular users), mod level features (editing), reporting, post count, topic/thread count, category management... i think i listed most of the notable features. by no means is it as feature packed and advanced as several packages out there - but i didn't need it to be. In fact, I was trying to keep it simple because the people managing it aren't tech savvy.
it was a great learning experience... it was a project that really helped me understand how to tackle mid-sized projects. it was a headache, and it took me about a solid 50-60 hours of coding to pull off. here's the good news, it hasn't been hacked yet because it's proprietary - and it's not overly complex. it also looks good on my resume/portfolio.
Our club went with a turnkey site host (wild apricot). We didn't ask enough questions about their forums. Here's some of the things we forgot.
Support for videos and pictures in posts. Should be at least as easy as blogger.com.
The ability to host the pics and videos on storage we control. Sites like picasa, snapfish, or even YouTube may not be around forever.
A versatile engine to search old posts.
The ability to backfill or forum history from our previous site.
The ability to export forum archives from the new site in a format useful to backfill some future provider's forum.
I also miss having a way to migrate or reformat old forum threads into wiki articles.
Maybe your users don't post things that have archival value. If so, then they are easier to support.
They're lying. I have worked with vBulletin, Invision, PHPBB and Simple Machines... you can integrate them but it is not easy and you better be ready to dedicate serious amounts of time to the task.
If you are a competent programmer, then it's a question of features. If you need a simple forum then it's going to be easier to write your own. If you really need all the advanced features of, say, vBulletin, then integrating it will be *harder* than writing your own simple forum but it will get you all those fancy features.
If you're not a competent programmer, then writing your own is a bad idea and trying to integrate them is also a bad idea. Instead you should just install it and leave it as unmodified as possible.
The biggest problem you need to consider is security. People around the world *will* try hack your forum and inject spam or possibly even malware. It's not a question of if it will happen, it absolutely will happen. And chances are pretty high they will succeed from time to time. Your only defence is to write your own forum (and do a really good job on security) or use one of the popular forum packages and install every new version almost immediately. Keeping the forum software up to date is a lot of work because there will be bugs and compatibility issues with your integration into the main website.
So to summarise, here are my recommended choices:
* use vBulletin or Simple Machines and don't customise anything (do this if you're not a very experience programmer or don't want to spend much time on it)
* build your own basic forum (do this if you are experienced and don't need a ton of complex features)
* integrate into vBulletin or Simple Machines (do this if you are experienced and need a ton of complex features)
http://disqus.com/
Customize it with CSS... call it a day. Forums are just pages with styled links. Your server doesn't suffer the load... the federated login is handled by others...
I had a flame... but she had a fire.
I wanted to simply host my forums using Google Groups, but unfortunately they force iFrame and all sorts of nasty stuff that just doesn't work as you can see from my example, a blank box where the forum should be. Haven't revisited it in a while but it really should be easier to leverage Groups. Any fixes? ;) - HEX
Horror & SciFi Erotic Nudes
Two things, one these products have huge attack surface areas along with a huge number of machines making them attractive targets. The simple fact that most are open source any code updates are often then maps to the just plugged vulnerabilities. So make sure you are religious about keeping it up to date.
Next I love a consistent look and feel as it seems so do you. So when you customize the forum make sure that you do it through their plug-in/addon/template system and don't just reach into the code to customize it. The simple reason is the first part of what I wrote. You will want to keep that puppy up to date and this will then wipe out your changes if you don't do it through the "approved" way. Once you start noodling their code you will then be tempted to delay an upgrade while you insert your changes in their new code. Don't! Some of the holes in various forums allow evil doers to pwn your machine. (insert offensive saying as to just how pwned it will be). Also keep in mind these evil doers run automated scripts making lists of machines that they can someday pwn.
I personally use simple machines forum for all of my forum needs. It integrates very well with any site and highly tweakable for your needs. It's written in php and works with damn near any database however I have only used it with mysql. Www.simplemachines.com
stackoverflow, yet another waste of bandwidth.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=does+anyone+care+what+they're+doing+over+at+stack%3F
What's this "we" stuff? I am not part of your "we" on Slashdot or Stack.
I run dozens of forums and can highly recommend SMF.
It's free, and there are tons of excellent add-ons for it (also free). I've been using it since version 2.x and it's evolved into a world-class forum package. I've also used VBulletin and phpBB, and neither of them, in my opinion, compares with SMF.
Forums are some sort of locked garden from which it is hard to extract information in any other way than browsing the pages. What about other workflows? Also, I hate registering for one-time posts, and this is usually a huge turn-off from posting anything, even if it could have been useful to others.
When in need for this type of solutions, I tend to set up mailing lists, which is by far the most flexible. Then, to cater for other workflows I use GMane [0].
You just need to tell it to archive your mailing list, and on top of that, it can provide forum-like interfaces with various type of flows representation (threaded [e.g., 1] or flat [e.g., 2]) and a web-based reply [e.g., 3] form with no mandatory registration (depending on your mailing list configuration) but proper identity checks. And it also provides NNTP access for people who prefer newsgroups.
You can also host instances of Weaver [4] (archiver) and Loom [5] (web frontend) locally if you don't want to rely on external services.
GMane has a neat interface which makes it easily intregrable to web templates through a simple iframe, too [e.g., 6].
[0] http://www.gmane.org/
[1] http://news.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.ports
[2] http://blog.gmane.org/gmane.os.openbsd.ports
[3] http://post.gmane.org/post.php?group=gmane.os.openbsd.ports&followup=58668
[4] http://weaver.gmane.org/
[5] http://loom.gmane.org/
[6] http://oml.mytestbed.net/tab/show/oml
How hard is it to implement Slashcode?
I use Invision Power for my website: http://www.styleguise.net and it works very well. My website is comprised of two components: a marketplace that I wrote from scratch using GWT + App Engine and a forum component which use the commercial off the shelf Invision Power suite. I have single sign on between my two applications as well.
IPBoard (the forum application from Invision power) is highly customizable. You can write a login module for it to integrate with any identity management system. It is written in PHP so you will need to develop your extensions in PHP also.
They also offers a traditional content management system called IPContent. It works pretty well once you figure out how things are laid out. The index/splash page for my site is simply a page served by the IPContent component.
I am a member on several forums that use vbulletin. One of them recently migrated to Huddler which I do not recommend at all. The other is still using a very old version of vbulletin. The their migrated to Invision Power. Invision Power seems to release more often and have better features than vbulletin.
Another option to choose if you have more money to spend is Jive. My company uses it for our customer facing forum system and also internally for content management.
If you have additional questions feel free to ask.
Check out simplemachines forum. It provides integration "hooks" you can tie into to run your own code for things like logging in, parsing bbcode, etc. There's also an API package floating around somewhere that will let you do things like log users in and out, create posts, and so on. You won't have the same luck with phpbb (the feature was attractive enough to me to tear out my phpbb install, and replace it with smf). It's got a clean, logical design, and in my opinion is much easier to understand and use than phpbb, particularly the permissions system.
To prevent spambots, use a honeypot widget on your log in form, and render the form with javascript. I've never had a single break-in since setting that up.
Provisioning bandwidth, storage, CPU, keeping backups, moderating, hacks, hack attempts, trolls, spammers, and eventually, DDOS attacks from people who got offended on your forums are much, much more challenge and work than just getting the forums running.
A mailing list is much nicer. No web UI to deal with. Just your e-mail client. Everything sorted into folders. Easy to get private replies.
A properly run mailing list with anti-spam filtering doesn't even have to require users to subscribe before posting.
Have a question? Just fire it off to the mailing list address. Replies go to you and if "reply all" is used, they are CC'd to the mailing list.
You clearly have no idea about forums. They are complicated beasts to write and manage and are constant vectors of attack.
Since this sounds like a forum for me and my CS mates. get PHPBB, else IP board.
Create a Google group and then use its embed feature to integrate it with your main website
http://support.google.com/groups/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=1191206
What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?
"tar xvf"
It's been a while but I integrated PHPBB with a few sites I've created, it was a bit fiddly, but there were a few guides on the forums on how to integrate the login into your own php code. As has been mentioned before it's important to keep them up to date for security as it tends to constantly get probed by hackers. And I can attest to the spam you get as others have said, definitely make sure you've a decent captcha/ human check on there.
We are also planning to integrate a forum software on our homepage and we will probably go with MyBB. Any experiences, sentiments or comments on that?
I know I sound like an old fuddy duddy but you could host your own usenet server and provide a news:// link. Newsreaders IMO have a better user experience and you can keep the out spam.
I've been looking at web frameworks lately, and other RIA Open Source goodies, and it's depressing how many only have support in mailing lists.
I don't want to create yet another disposable email account (too many to manage already) for such a thing, as I don't want my embarrassing newbie questions linked to my real ID, and in fact just the IP address in an email would link to my workplace. No thanks.
If you're in the 'business' of creating WWW software, for Heaven's sake go with the WWW idea of running a support forum!
No, the person who is trying to make other people do his research for him instead of doing a simple google search is the dick.
phorum is fast/lightweight and extremely customizable.
If you are comfortable with PHP you should have no problems
The technology behind a forum is pretty much irrelevant if you don't have a proper method to manage it, and to keep users happy and interested.
There are several good books on the subject of managing forums that will give you a huge leg-up in learning how to run one.
Most forums FAIL because the people running them don't figure things out fast enough. It will require daily, persistent, and considerate attention every day. If you don't have someone to do that then don't bother with a forum.
There are two things you never, ever, EVER want on your main webserver or app server: blog software (Wordpress, etc) and user-generated or uploaded content. Both are several orders of magnitude more likely to get your server pwn3d, and keeping them at arm's length from your main site & app server is kind of like building a ship with bulkhead doors to contain flooding in the event of a breach.
I speak from experience. Wordpress got totally owned somehow on its server. My app? Safe, 2500 miles away, on a server with no usernames/passwords/hostnames in common.
The problem is that apps like VBulletin, PhpBB, & others might actually be more secure than YOUR app, but your app doesn't have 47,000 hackers searching it for vulnerabilities & ready to exploit every site using the same software the moment a 0-day is found. Web forums are "high-value" targets. Your app, running one one server with a few thousand daily users, is not. You'll still get attacked, of course, but you're less likely to get compromised by some wacky, obscure bug in a system library that only affects a few servers (including yours), because THOSE exploits are only worth the time & effort of attackers when they can be automated or have enough potential victims to be worthwhile.
Another reason for a totally different hostname: to keep your whole site from getting blacklisted by Google over an XSS exploit some user pulled off in a posting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disqus
Casteism
Of fer'cryin'out lo-PLEASE, PLEASE can't the /. editors put something into their codebase to prevent this sort of Slashvertisement?
This was posted in the same minute that the original topic was, but a user account with no prior posts (and currently only 1 subsequent post (different topic, modded down as troll)).
Can't we automate this sort of check? I hate to say it, but maybe you could crib something from StackExchange?
Ok, I feel better now
http://www.namastu.com/services/seo-services/content-writing-services/
Simple Machines Forum is exactly as the name implies - simple to install and simple to integrate. The software has SSI functions which allows you to use forum data on external pages. There are integration functions and an API include which allow you to either tie your site login (and other access) into SMF or tie SMF into your site login and access.
The theming/template system in SMF is very versatile and there are many themes available for SMF, both free and paid - and it's moderately easy to make your own, custom theme as well (although you do need a working knowledge of php, html and css to do that.)
The package manager makes SMF one of the easiest forum packages to apply modifications to, and there are hundreds of free pre-packaged, supported mods to add feature combinations which can make your forum exactly what you want it to be. There are several Anti-Spam mods which can make your site spam-resistant (nothing is totally spam-proof, no matter what anyone claims)
SMF also has several "portal" mods which - while not a full blown CMS, can perform as a "lite" CMS, including articles, individual pages, blocks, etc.
For example, I run a site which has SMF, with a portal mod and several other mods.
We have a front page, a media gallery (which allows uploads and downloads), an article system, calendar, link-list, affiliate banner sharing, glossary and many more features - all done with the SMF software plus mods. (It replaced our original implementation of joomla+forum)
Best of all, Simple Machines Forum has an ACTIVE support community and is FREE.
VBulletin, while a nice piece of software is anything but free.
If it were me I'd roll the entire site as well as the forum into Drupal. There are great forum modules available and the flexibility is there to do whatever you want.
or else!