How hard is it to run a forum?

[iamdarkyoshi]

So here I am, asking a question about a forum, on a forum.

<insert stupid meme>

 

How hard is it for a person like me to setup and host a forum? Just a small one, perhaps 20 members or so.

 

I am very good at hardware but not great at software. Setting it up might be really tricky.

 

I did a google search for free forum software, and the first one that came up was PHPBB

 

If I were to HOST it at my house, would it be feasible for a small forum? I would run the software with either my PC (hopefully not, takes far too much power and is loud) or my new garage PC (3ghz core2 quad with 16GB DDR3) and a rather poor network (60mbit/s down, 4mbit/s up)

 

How much setting up would there be in terms of the server software, networking, etc? I know a quad core PC from 2007 and a 30$ a month consumer internet connection aren't great, but I just want to see what is possible as an admin of a small forum.

 

Also, what would be the best way of keeping everything secure, other than simply only letting certain people use it? This is my home network which is used by 4 other people.

 

Any advice/info?

[MrBucket101]

running the forum isn't all that hard

 

the tough part is getting members, cause w/o those...it's just some dude and a server

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 minute ago, Jonnyswboy said:

I would get a cheap VPS, you can get an Ubuntu VPS for like $7 a month with a 1Gbit/s connection. Just get apache on it and you can use whatever you want like PHPBB as you suggested. There is other existing "forum software" that I would check out besides PHPBB, not to say that PHPBB is bad, I just know their is a lot of options.

Even though 7$ is not a huge amount, I just want to see how it would work first and then upgrade later if needbe.

[iamdarkyoshi]

1 hour ago, Jonnyswboy said:

Yeah, you could get Apache on your current system, just make sure you have port 80 forwarded.

 

https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

I have.... NO idea what I am doing

[mikat]

4 hours ago, Jonnyswboy said:

Yeah, you could get Apache on your current system, just make sure you have port 80 forwarded.

 

https://www.apachefriends.org/index.html

MEAN > LAMP

Javascript will rule the internet 

[minibois]

@pspfreak @tmcclelland455 @Hackzzila

I know these guys have/had a forum so maybe they can help. I don't really know anything on the hardware site or even software.. 

[flibberdipper]

I do have a forum, and while it is phpBB, I have it hosted through Forumatic. Painless to use.

[Dat Guy]

Don't run a server without knowing what you're doing. You'll regret. 

[AlTech]

9 hours ago, tmcclelland455 said:

I do have a forum, and while it is phpBB, I have it hosted through Forumatic. Painless to use.

Would you recommend IP Board? (What this forum uses)

 

It can be super expensive but other than that, it is super awesome.

[AlTech]

22 hours ago, Jonnyswboy said:

I would get a cheap VPS, you can get an Ubuntu VPS for like $7 a month with a 1Gbit/s connection. Just get apache on it and you can use whatever you want like PHPBB as you suggested. There is other existing "forum software" that I would check out besides PHPBB, not to say that PHPBB is bad, I just know their is a lot of options.

 

I've used VPSDime in the past and they worked great for me, just make sure you know how to get VNC running and whatnot from putty. I used SSH tunneling or something like that.

http://vpsdime.com/

Would it be possible to use Moodle as a forum software?

 

I know it wasn't built to be that way but still......

[KuJoe]

For software I would recommend using MyBB, it's an awesome FOSS (Free Open Source Software) that's pretty darn secure, easy to setup and use, and full of functionality (I use this for my company's intranet forum). You can run it on anything that supports PHP and MySQL.

 

If you're just starting off then I would look into free web hosting or something cheap like http://buyshared.com/ ($5/year) just so you don't have to worry about security on your end. I've been out of the free web hosting field for a while so I can't comment on any in particular without self promoting, so just search around and find one that fits your needs (500MB-1GB of storage and 1-10GB of bandwidth is all you'll need unless you plan on hosting a lot of downloads or AV content).

 

As for performance, you don't need a whole lot. I host a forum with over 12k members and over 480k posts and the resource usage is minimal, I could run it on an Atom CPU with 2GB of RAM if I wanted to. Personally, I've run a forum on my NAS with a single core 800MHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM and that thing would be overkill for 20 people. Network connection isn't important either since each page load will be less than 100KB (unless you put a lot of images on it) for even a 10Mbps home connection would be fine for 20+ users.

[AlTech]

8 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

For software I would recommend using MyBB, it's an awesome FOSS (Free Open Source Software) that's pretty darn secure, easy to setup and use, and full of functionality (I use this for my company's intranet forum). You can run it on anything that supports PHP and MySQL.

 

If you're just starting off then I would look into free web hosting or something cheap like http://buyshared.com/ ($5/year) just so you don't have to worry about security on your end. I've been out of the free web hosting field for a while so I can't comment on any in particular without self promoting, so just search around and find one that fits your needs (500MB-1GB of storage and 1-10GB of bandwidth is all you'll need unless you plan on hosting a lot of downloads or AV content).

 

As for performance, you don't need a whole lot. I host a forum with over 12k members and over 480k posts and the resource usage is minimal, I could run it on an Atom CPU with 2GB of RAM if I wanted to. Personally, I've run a forum on my NAS with a single core 800MHz ARM CPU and 512MB of RAM and that thing would be overkill for 20 people. Network connection isn't important either since each page load will be less than 100KB (unless you put a lot of images on it) for even a 10Mbps home connection would be fine for 20+ users.

What's the name of your forum? I wanna have a look to see how good this approach would be

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

Would you recommend IP Board? (What this forum uses)

 

It can be super expensive but other than that, it is super awesome.

God I fucking love IPS. Its feature set and customizability is just nuts.

[AlTech]

6 minutes ago, tmcclelland455 said:

God I fucking love IPS. Its feature set and customizability is just nuts.

But the price....................

 

[KuJoe]

42 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

What's the name of your forum? I wanna have a look to see how good this approach would be

It's not my forum, the owner just uses my company to host it so I was just commenting on the resource usage.

[AlTech]

5 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

It's not my forum, the owner just uses my company to host it so I was just commenting on the resource usage.

Do you know the name of the forum?

[KuJoe]

2 minutes ago, AluminiumTech said:

Do you know the name of the forum?

I do but it's not my forum to share publicly. Sorry.

[AlTech]

4 minutes ago, KuJoe said:

I do but it's not my forum to share publicly. Sorry.

ok

[Godlygamer23]

23 hours ago, MrBucket101 said:

the tough part is getting members, cause w/o those...it's just some dude and a server

And depending on the size of it, you'll also need people willing to be moderators for it.

[flibberdipper]

1 hour ago, AluminiumTech said:

But the price....................

 

Tell me about it. I can't faithfully spend that much on my forum seeing as it's as good as dead right now.

 

 

[iamdarkyoshi]

2 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

And depending on the size of it, you'll also need people willing to be moderators for it.

I would have to moderate. Oh dear.

[AlTech]

16 minutes ago, iamdarkyoshi said:

I would have to moderate. Oh dear.

I could be a moderator for you .

[arnavvr]

19 hours ago, AluminiumTech said:

Do you know the name of the forum?

I do, http://pouringpixels.forumatic.com/index.php

[AlTech]

1 hour ago, arnavvr said:

I do, http://pouringpixels.forumatic.com/index.php

Lol. that forum though........

[RustyGuts]

I use Discourse to run our forum. Costs $5 per month and in our glory we had quite a few active users. Defiantly get a SSD Vps, we use digitalocean. Shared webhosting on hard drives is just misery. I would not recommend IP Board like LTT uses, its good software but its really meant for very large communities. I can't recommend Discourse enough, its very clean and its easy to use and customize. With Digitalocean there is a one click install too so you can have your forum built in less than 60 seconds. Of course there is always the option to build it manually which is more fun!

 

squad.gg