good free bulletin software

[dubesinhower]

im thinking of making a forum for school. i dont really want to pay hundreds of dollars for vbulletin or invision or whatever those software programs cost lol. does anyone know of some good bulletin software for free or possibly for cheap?

 

[epidemik]

SMF or PHPBB is the way to go for free bulletin software. Both are pretty easy to use.
You can try them out (and a bunch others) here: http://php.opensourcecms.com/scripts/show.php?catid=5&cat=Forums

 

[Shane]

If its your first forum and dont realy want all the hastle of setting it up then why not just go with a forum thats already done?

Thats the forum,Hosting and everything for free,and its very fast too the forums are not slow and i think are backed up reguarly.

Invisionfree is good,All you have to do is register the name of your forum,set up the catergories and forum permissions and your off.

You will however have to pay for a domain name if you would like one but theyre so cheap.

 

[Tayl]

I'd have to agree with both above posts. If you have your own server, want to set up the whole forum yourself manually and configure pretty much everything yourself then go with PHPBB http://www.phpbb.com/

However if you don't have your own server, don't wish to pay absolutely anything for a forum and want everything 'click and go' then like Nevakonaza said, go with Invisionfree. I used Invisionfree before purchasing a web server and it's really good for people who don't wish to pay anything. The only problem is, if you wish to migrate to your own server at a later date for any particular reason (maybe you've decided to purchase a server and domain because you want to make your own website and have a forum for it) you can't, as far as I'm aware, get a backup of the database for the forum with Invisionfree to carry it over. Which is why I ended up going with PHPBB once I'd got my own server.

If you wanted a really cheap web server host so you can host your own forum then it might be an idea to state where you're location is (most people prefer their host to be within the same country). Then people can recommend you good, cheap, reliable hosts.

Tayl.

 

[dubesinhower]

i live in the usa in connecticut. i have my own web site hosted on hostgator. would i be able to host a forum off of my website, or do i need a server to host the forum on?