Host a forum

If you read my last last post, you read that I added a forum to this site. Something I’m uber psyched about - something I’m psyched about for several reasons, and I’ll tell ya why…

Adding a forum to your site does a few things for you. It gives people a reason to come to your site by providing a valuable resource to your readers, if used it gives you TONS of free content, it helps your search engine placement via all that free relevant content, it give you one more place to put some ads by which to monetize your site even further, and, it’s fun!

As this is my first attempt at fully creating & hosting a forum and not particularly one of my fortés, I can’t give you complete instruction into all of the technical aspects of it. I can however, guide you in the right direction and help you to get your forum up-and-running.

What forum program/code should I use?

When I was researching what forum solution to use for a site I ran for a client some years ago, I found phpBB to be one of the simplest to implement, administer, and use. I also liked the fact it was part of the sourceforge project and was open source (meaning: free software, and if I learned how, I could modify it to my heart’s content). Now this was long ago, so when I was researching what to use for this site I started my search all over again, only to find phpBB, now more evolved, was still the best game in town (at least in my opinion and for my uses).

For the newbies, phpBB is short for; .php - a type of popular and useful internet script language + BB - stands for “Bulletin Board“. your web host needs to support PHP, and most do these day. If in doubt ask.

To learn more specifically you should visit the phpBB website at: http://www.phpbb.com

Here’s what you need to know to implement it.

Go to: http://www.phpbb.com and download the zip file with the needed files. Then, go to: http://www.phpbb.com/support/documentation/3.0/quickstart/ for install instructions.

That’s it. It’s really easy! Just follow the directions at www.phpbb.com and you can’t go wrong! I did it today with not much prior knowledge, from start to finish, and it’s working just fine for me. Its really easy, and the fine folks at phpbb.com are there to help all along the way.

If you do have any questions (or answers) feel free to visit our new forum at: forum.TysBlog.com. Hopefully someone can help you there - at least that’s the goal…

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