Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
You're a dick. We should ban people from posting LMGTFY links on Slashdot just like we did on stackoverflow.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/BuildingCommunitieswithSo.html
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.
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.
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.
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.
How hard is it to implement Slashcode?