Forum creation?

[Broughden]

If someone wanted to create a forum, with the potential for up to 5k registered users, the need for different sections with access allowed based on permissions (kinda like F13's sekret forums), and possibly have pic/calendar hosting added in.....how would you do this?

Use godaddy or some other host and create using PhP or vBulletin?
Or is there a robust enough forum service that could handle that kind of user load and allow enough individualization to create up to 30 forums/sub-forums with some hidden from users based on permissions?

Looking at options for a non-profit I belong to. ie I need to do this cheaply out of pocket or get it done for free.

Any help appreciated.


Edited to add:

Either of these any good?
I notice the first one is free but seems to charge for a custom domain name creation and to remove ads. http://www.forumer.com/
And then this one which seems to charge from the get go but includes domain name http://www.siteground.com/vbulletin-hosting.htm

But since they include the forum software itself it seems cheaper than possibly buying vBulletin for $200 or so bucks and having to register a domain?

[Samwise]

SMF (what F13 runs on) is free and is not hard to set up.

I have not found any free forum hosts that seem like they could handle any sort of appreciable user load.  And commercial forum hosting places seem to charge way too much for what they do.

[Salamok]

also there are 5000 registered users who post 20 times a day vs. the 5000 who post once a week.  If you actually have a budget and any experience configuring apache I'd probably feel it out with on a reasonable VPS like linode and install SMF.  You can go month to month for $20 a month but it isn't a managed solution so you will be configuring the server yourself.

[Broughden]

also there are 5000 registered users who post 20 times a day vs. the 5000 who post once a week.  If you actually have a budget and any experience configuring apache I'd probably feel it out with on a reasonable VPS like linode and install SMF.  You can go month to month for $20 a month but it isn't a managed solution so you will be configuring the server yourself.

Okay that looks way over my ability level. I dont even know HTML programming and just found out that I will need to learn to be able to create any type of forum "style" I want? 

SMF (what F13 runs on) is free and is not hard to set up.

I have not found any free forum hosts that seem like they could handle any sort of appreciable user load.  And commercial forum hosting places seem to charge way too much for what they do.

So SMF vs vBulletin vs phpBB3...pros and cons?

As for user load.....we have approximately 14k members. I figure about a third or around 5k will use the forums, if we get word out we are going to give them a try. On top of that though will be general public traffic I am hoping. But Im probably way over estimating and would be happy with and we would probably be fine with something that can handle 100 users logged in at a time?
Did I mention we are a non-profit and I will end up doing this out of pocket? So cheap is good. And I will need to learn how to work all admin stuff. 

[Righ]

As for user load.....we have approximately 14k members.

...

And I will need to learn how to work all admin stuff.

Don't take this the wrong way, but in a non-profit of 14 thousand members, there is almost certainly somebody who does this sort of stuff for a living or hobby and who can better install and administer it. Perhaps you should reassign yourself with the task of finding this person or people and convincing them that they want to do it.

[Salamok]

SMF comes with default styles (many downloadable user generated themes as well), you will need to copy the files to your server.  The setup documentation will cover pretty much everything you need to know.

phpBB most shared hosts have this available as sort of a 1 click install package.

vBulletin costs money, I don't know too much about it.

Depending on how hiccup free your install goes you may need to set permissions on the files/directories.  Most of your configuration time will be spent configuring the BB using it's admin tool (unless you end up creating your own style).  

I would say setting up a BB isn't as hard as you are probably building it up in your mind to be.  Not sure how difficult it will be to get it running smoothly for 5k subscribers.  The only experience I have is setting up guild forums of 200 subs at the most and on a cheap shared host they were not the speediest of things.  I'm sure one of the mods or admins here can fill in some more details on what to expect with higher volume.

[RhyssaFireheart]

A vBulletin license costs $100 for a yearly license, or $180 for a permanent one, but you have to pay for upgrades after a year, AFAIK.  I'm the admin over at OneManga and we have a vBulletin setup.  Now, I didn't do the actual install and I haven't done any of the upgrades, but looking at the behind the scenes stuff in the admin panel, I don't think it's that difficult.  Creating a custom theme isn't too difficult either, as long as you take your time and think about what you're doing.  I've created new colored skins based off the default that comes with the software, and I've also customized a complete skin layout for the Pen and Paper Games recently.  The graphics part may be more difficult, but just changing colors and such to something more appropriate isn't too hard at all.

I've only had vague associations with phpBB and non at all with SMF, outside of using F13.

[Samwise]

I dont even know HTML programming and just found out that I will need to learn to be able to create any type of forum "style" I want?  

I'm going to agree with Righ here -- you want to find someone else to do this.  Setting up a high-traffic forum is not the best way to cut your teeth on Unix/HTML/CSS/PHP.  For someone with rudimentary expertise in these things it should be pretty easy, but if it's your first exposure to any sort of web adminning/development it's going to be overwhelming.

[Lantyssa]

Even if you're experienced it will eat up a ton of time.  Problems seem to grow exponentially with users, too, so it's really not something you want to start learning on.

[Broughden]

I dont even know HTML programming and just found out that I will need to learn to be able to create any type of forum "style" I want?  

I'm going to agree with Righ here -- you want to find someone else to do this.  Setting up a high-traffic forum is not the best way to cut your teeth on Unix/HTML/CSS/PHP.  For someone with rudimentary expertise in these things it should be pretty easy, but if it's your first exposure to any sort of web adminning/development it's going to be overwhelming.

Although I quite agree Im probably not the best for the job, its never the less fallen to me to complete.
So Ive set up a domain and hosting and uploaded SMF to it. The basic (ie stock havent changed a thing) forums are up and running.

Any tips on uploading and modifying a particular style?
Any recommended mods I should download and install from the SMF page?

[RhyssaFireheart]

Not sure on mods or changes, but the biggest mistake that new forums seem to make is having too many forums right off.  It's better to start with fewer or a more consolidated set of forums and expand them as needed down the line versus having a ton of specific or specialized forums with little to no traffic at first. 

Also, might want to check out the Admin Zone boards.  It's admin/staff specific forums where people can ask for help/advice/suggestions and has an area dedicated to SMF.

[Trippy]

Any tips on uploading and modifying a particular style?
Any recommended mods I should download and install from the SMF page?

We only run a handful of mods here most of which have to do with preventing bots from registering and are often not working (they tend to break when I update the base software and I never bother to fix them). The only regular user visible mod we run is the spoiler tag one, which is a relatively recent addition.

[Broughden]

Any tips on uploading and modifying a particular style?
Any recommended mods I should download and install from the SMF page?

We only run a handful of mods here most of which have to do with preventing bots from registering and are often not working (they tend to break when I update the base software and I never bother to fix them). The only regular user visible mod we run is the spoiler tag one, which is a relatively recent addition.

What about certain forums being only visible to certain user groups/people? I saw a mod for something similar to that, which we have here at F13.....are you using that mod or is that also included in the base abilities of SMF?
Because Im setting it all up right now. Fresh pot of coffee and Im not sleeping till its all done.

For the Spoiler Tag mod do you remember which version you are using? I see three different ones by three different authors on the SMF site.

Not sure on mods or changes, but the biggest mistake that new forums seem to make is having too many forums right off.  It's better to start with fewer or a more consolidated set of forums and expand them as needed down the line versus having a ton of specific or specialized forums with little to no traffic at first. 

Also, might want to check out the Admin Zone boards.  It's admin/staff specific forums where people can ask for help/advice/suggestions and has an area dedicated to SMF.

Thanks for the heads up on the admin support forums. Will check those out.
As for the number of boads....yeah its going to be huge. 
We have general public boards, instructor only, instructor trainer, instructor trainer educator, national BoD's and its committees, divisional BoD's and its committees. So Im going to set up lots of different user groups and try to hide certain boards based on what permissions you are granted by the admins (same way F13 does). Not sure how that works but will figure it out tonight hopefully.
I dont think more than a hundred people though will need the personalized permissions to the different national/regional boards so it shouldnt be to time intensive in terms of set up and upkeep. Luckily they dont change all that often either.

[Trippy]

We have custom membergroups (part of base) for controlling who can see what.

Our spoiler tag package is called: Spoiler Tag 0.3.3a

and the actual package file is: Spoiler-0.3.3a.tar.gz.

Note we're still running 1.1.X as I'm too lazy to move to 2.0 (actually it would require a lot of work to get our current theme ported over to 2.0).

[Broughden]

We have custom membergroups (part of base) for controlling who can see what.

Our spoiler tag package is called: Spoiler Tag 0.3.3a

and the actual package file is: Spoiler-0.3.3a.tar.gz.

Note we're still running 1.1.X as I'm too lazy to move to 2.0 (actually it would require a lot of work to get our current theme ported over to 2.0).

Yeah Im using 1.1.10....

edit- and found the proper spoiler tag mod. thanks!

[Salamok]

isn't the youtube embedding a mod?

[Trippy]

Not the one we use on here. I wrote that one myself.

I should say it's not a SMF mod -- it's a pure JavaScript library.

[schild]

There's actually an updated version of our base theme for 2.x but ill let trippy off the hook since I need to redo all the art. Maybe ill do that this weekend.

/posted from phone

Edit: Also, Broughden, I don't care if it's non-profit. You should be paid for dealing with all that shit. Also, I doubt you'll get 5k of them actively posting anything. It takes a certain mindset to post on a forum and a more certain mindset to run one. I highly recommend passing it off the moment you set it up, otherwise I don't see you being part of that organization by this time next year.

[Broughden]

isn't the youtube embedding a mod?

I used this mod.
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=977

[Broughden]

Edit: Also, Broughden, I don't care if it's non-profit. You should be paid for dealing with all that shit. Also, I doubt you'll get 5k of them actively posting anything. It takes a certain mindset to post on a forum and a more certain mindset to run one. I highly recommend passing it off the moment you set it up, otherwise I don't see you being part of that organization by this time next year.

Well I appreciate the warnings. And yes hopefully I will be passing it off once done and up and running.

Okay so...I got all of the subforums created, and the user groups and set the permissions. And up loaded all the mods I think I want, at least for now.

Last thing. Which I would probably would be able to figure out on my own were it not for the fact its 6:30am in the morning and I have been up all night working on this. 

So I am using this theme as a base: http://custom.simplemachines.org/themes/index.php?lemma=1897
How do I go about adding a logo and slogan and basically just changing the entire banner across the top? Ive figured out some basic html stuff but havent figured out how to access the basic pages set up in themes to personalize them.

[Salamok]

The cheap and easy way if you don't want to modify the html is to right click the image in the banner and select save as.  This gives you the dimensions you will need for your new banner image and the filename you need to save it as/hunt down and replace.

[Broughden]

The cheap and easy way if you don't want to modify the html is to right click the image in the banner and select save as.  This gives you the dimensions you will need for your new banner image and the filename you need to save it as/hunt down and replace.

Thanks for the tip. It worked.
Problem is I dont own photoshop, and even though I thought I did a pretty good job using MSpaint, once I posted it back into the forums it looked like crap. So I out sourced that to someone who owns Photoshop.
Hopefully if he gets that back to me today, I will post it up and you guys can see and critique my labor of love.

[Sheepherder]

GIMP

You should provide a link once this goes live so we can all point and laugh.

[Soln]

phpBB any good?  why the SMF love?

[Checkers]

(kinda like F13's sekret forums)

=(

[nurtsi]

phpBB any good?  why the SMF love?

A bit on tangent, maybe someone here can shed some light on this, but how the feck do you 'search this thread' in SMF? Is it hidden somewhere? I only seem to get the option to search entire boards. Also the spellchecker doesn't seem work on Firefox 3.5.5 on OS X (just get a white popup with nothing in it).

[Yoru]

phpBB any good?  why the SMF love?

phpBB is the target of nearly every bot and cracker out there. If you like robospam "members" and occasionally having your server hijacked via phpBB exploits, go for it.

[Trippy]

A bit on tangent, maybe someone here can shed some light on this, but how the feck do you 'search this thread' in SMF? Is it hidden somewhere? I only seem to get the option to search entire boards. Also the spellchecker doesn't seem work on Firefox 3.5.5 on OS X (just get a white popup with nothing in it).

SMF's search is not good. If you need to find something in the forums use Google. Put "site:forums.f13.net" in the front of your query and you'll search the forums. The built-in spell check hasn't been working since we moved servers (cause I haven't fixed it yet) but if you are using Firefox why aren't you using its spell checker?

[Lantyssa]

A bit on tangent, maybe someone here can shed some light on this, but how the feck do you 'search this thread' in SMF? Is it hidden somewhere? I only seem to get the option to search entire boards. Also the spellchecker doesn't seem work on Firefox 3.5.5 on OS X (just get a white popup with nothing in it).

SMF's search is not good. If you need to find something in the forums use Google. Put "site:forums.f13.net" in the front of your query and you'll search the forums. The built-in spell check hasn't been working since we moved servers (cause I haven't fixed it yet) but if you are using Firefox why aren't you using its spell checker?

Out of curiosity, why don't we (you) make a search link to Google with that trick?

[Trippy]

Cause I'm lazy? And it's nicer if the search results keeps you on the site instead of taking you to Google and that requires even more work.

[WayAbvPar]

(kinda like F13's sekret forums)

=(

Now we are going to have to discuss your impertinence in the secret forums.

[Signe]

Thank you for reading the title of this thread! 

[NiX]

Thank you for reading the title of this thread! 

You're welcome!

Always so polite, such a nice girl.

[Signe]

Someone is messing with my mind.  It's freaking me out, man.

[Nevermore]

I like how NiX's avatar is staring down at Signe's boobs.