What is a Forum? If you ask this question you may get different answers some people call them as message boards or bulletin boards, some call them as discussion boards or discussion groups ,some can say they are conferences and some people also considers them as chat rooms.Forum is a discussion area on a website where people have the ability to start discussion (new thread) and reply to other people’s messages(threads). People converse with each other by posting their messages. All posted messages are visible to all.
A forum has hierarchical or tree-like structure. It can contain a number of subforums, each of which are related to different topics. Within a forum’s topic you find thread. Every new discussion is called as thread.
Depending upon forum’s settings users can either be anonymous or registered users. Registered users need to log in to post or edit their messages or start a new thread. Other than users, moderators are also there, who are held responsible for moderating the discussion and for keeping the forum spamfree. A moderator can access all members posts and threads.
Administrator deals with technical details of the website. Anytime admin can change software items running on the site. Sometimes administrator also works as moderator. Languages which are commonly used in forums are PHP, ASP, Perl and Java.
There are many websites which are offering free forum softwares. Here below is the list of top 7 websites offering free forum software.
1.Simple Machines Forum It is a free software package which allows you to make an easy, elegant, customizable and high quality discussion forums. It is PHP based forum which uses MySQL as backend.
2. phpBB This is a free package manager which allows you to make fast, high quality customizable forums. They provide an extendable support to their users.
3. Vanilla Forums This is package of free open source, standard and customizable forums. This site follows “Sales Up, Cost Down” approach . They provides you full flexibility for your forum design, single-sign-on capability for external sites and applications and flexible architecture which allows customized plugins.
4. bbPress This is a PHP/MySQL based forum software developed by the creators of WordPress. This is simple, fast, secured and easy to use and easy to administrate.
5. Phorum This is a PHP and MySQL open source forum software. Here you get the freedom to create your message board and do whatever u want. You can even rearrange your data in any form.
This lists of Free forum softwares doesn’t ends here. There are many such websites which provides you free forum software.
Hello
ReplyDeleteI think phpBB is the best one ! It's free and offers a lot of possibilities.
To get full use of the software, I recommend Forumotion which is the best free forums hoster to Create a Forum
www.forumotion.com