Thinking about a Forum idea

[k2zs]

Hello,

My name is Scott and I am new to WB. I am thinking about adding forums to a few web sites that I have and would be interested in hearing the pros and conns. I run 3 Ham Radio related web sites, 1 for myself, 1 for a club I belong to, and 1 for a radio contest our club sponsors. I doubt I will start a forum for the club website as we already utilize an email reflector but my other sites deal with specific content that may be useful to many others. I can see the Pro's of forums for those sites but what are the Conns? I downloaded an open source product called Phorum today and successfully set up 2 different forums on my dev server. When I registered for membership on THIS forum today I see the complexity of this forums registration process is far more secure than Phorums. Is spamming a BIG issue to public forums? and should I look further for a better application?

Thanks to all,

Scott

[k2zs]

Actually I read some of the other posts and tried phpBB2. It didn't require me to reply to an email to complete my registration. Is it a setting thing or do I have to move away from "Open Source" products?

[kelevraco]

The PhPbb series does not come stock with this feature. However, there are a few mods out there that do allow you to add this feature along with some great ones to prevent spam and even bots from registering. I no longer use PHPbb for my forums but here is a link to the mods for PHPBB3 there should be a section for 2 but I would suggest upgrading to the latest release.
http://www.phpbb.com/mods/

[kelevraco]

I use a opensource product for my sites and have all the functions but it is only compatible with e107.

[k2zs]

I have explored phpBB and it seems much better than Phorum. There was mention of preventing Bots from registering, Aren't Bots desirable to help promote a site? PhpBB even has a default user group for Bots, would it be advisable to disable that group?

Thanks for everyones help.

Scott

[kelevraco]

There are different types of bots. One is commonly referred to as spiders these are the bots that search engines use. The other bots that these programs target are the spam bots. Bots that sign up for your forums and then start to post in every topic found they can post to. Some of the more aggressive ones will post 5-10 times in a thread. They are usually spamming info about viagra or something along those lines.

[meloncholy]

You may also want to look into vBulletin, as used by this site. It's not free, but it has a lot of useful admin and user features that make phpBB feel rather primitive (particularly version phpBB 2).

The phpBB group for bots is presumably for spiders such as Googlebot, as kelevraco mentioned. They self report as bots (via the browser string) and won't try to register for your forum or post about viagra.

Spam bots can be a real problem. I used to look after a forum on a fairly low traffic site that at one stage was getting 10-20 bot registrations per day, despite using a CAPTCHA and email confirmation. (Actually, most of the bots would fail to confirm their registration and many of the ones that did wouldn't post, but I still had to spend time deleting all the accounts.) It got much better after I moved over to reCAPTCHA, with just a few getting through now.

I imagine the situation is much worse on more popular sites like this - big warning on signup here:

SPAMMERS MAY LOSE THEIR EMAIL ACCOUNTS. PLEASE DO NOT JOIN THIS FORUM TO ADVERTISE YOUR SITE.

[k2zs]

Yes, after seeing much about vBulletin I looked into it. Kinda on a shoe string budget so to speak. After spending the night here last night to really find out what a forum is about I'm now wondering if the forum I wanted to start could really support it's topic. This site (WB) is a fantastic place with great content and contributors. I am afraid my forum would sit empty. Currently the site gets between 2 - 10 visitors a day. All I really need is a way for administrators to post announcements and I can do that myself in php.

All things to ponder...

[Garry]

Well, if you are short of budget than you can consider phpbb as an option for creating a forum. phpbb is an open source i.e. free forum application and hence you can use it for free. Also, it has good features and is quite stable.

When it comes to the traffic of the forum, you can start working on the SEO part of the forums to get more traffic. The content does create a good impact and hence the content of the forum should be good. If the content is good, visitors will surely register and start sharing knowledge and information.