Posted by Darth Wong (65.95.144.244) on July 03, 2002 at 01:43:46:
Well, on the advice of His Divine Shadow, I checked out phpBB. It certainly looked good, but I initially dismissed it because it requires PHP and a database connection.
But then I checked my service provider to see what's available on my account, which I had to upgrade a while ago because I was routinely blowing my bandwidth load before the end of the month (I'm sure you guys know what it's like to blow your load early).
And guess what: my account DOES include PHP and MySQL!! Just for fun, I downloaded phpBB2, and I tried it out. This thing is so easy to set up, it's almost a crime! If you're curious to check it out, it's at www.stardestroyer.net/phpBB2, and it looks pretty slick (not that I take credit for this; these guys have crafted a sweet piece of freeware). I honestly can't believe I was able to set this up for $0.
Since this little forum experiment has turned out to be (in my opinion) fairly successful, I think that I will put the bigger, better forum in place on the main site. This board will stay (I'm not going to delete it, now that it has 200 messages in it), but once I'm happy with the operation of the new one, I'll make the new one public.
If anybody wants to be a beta tester, just head on over and let me know if there's something I should change. I'm not sure about the security settings (right now, anybody can post without registering, and people don't need an E-mail callback to register) and the graphics could use some customizing, but other than that, this thing was a dirt-easy half-hour setup. Honestly, I don't know how those UBB guys are supposed to make money when there's freeware like this stuff, aggressively emulating its look and feel.