Web Hosting Blog

Discussion forums were around years before anyone even thought of Web 2.0. At the same time if there is any good example so my grandmother to understand what does Web 2.0 mean, that would a be a phrase ”web forum”. I would say “It is a place when you can ask other people about the things they like, to receive advice, to complain and to stay in touch”. Anything else is a combination of and ideas, perceptions and technology.

There are tons of Web 2.0 networks and sites today, but discussion boards are still the best place where you can go and ask for anything that you need. And most people are ready to help.

Which forums software to use?

There are many good software - vBulletin and Invision Power Board among the most appreciated from the consumers. These two however are considered as “expensive” from most site owners who want to start a web forum. There are some freeware alternatives to vBulleting and IPB. Most popular of them is phpBB forum, Simple Machines Forum and Vanilla forums.

Vanilla and phpBB are part of Host Color’s PowerTools autoinstaller software library for more than an year. Simple Machines is one of the latest applications we’ve added to our hosting services. WE highly recommed SMF as very elegant and advanced forum software. SMF is a PHP base software. Take a look at some of its features:

• Works on PHP and MySQL.
• Has Advanced permission and user management.
• Supports multiple languages at once.
• Offers tracking of new and old unread topics, not just from your last visit.
• Comes with multi-language support from a large community.
• Administrative actions require the user’s password (and do not rely solely on cookies.)
• Has an ability to display page creation time and query count per page.
• Reorder boards within categories, or reorder categories.
• Allows certain membergroups to access a board, including guests only.
• Has an ability to indicate new posts to child boards but nothing new in parent.

The SMF forum is a part of 3 of Host Color’s hosting plans - Max Pack, Business Hosting (Mega) and Multi Domain Hosting.