Starting a new forum.

Krynn72

Krynn72

The Freeman
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So I have a personal site and the hosting package I got for it is way wayyyyy to much for how much traffic I see. Ive got 300 gigs of bandwidth and the most I have ever used is 11 gigs. I also have 300 gigs of storage, which i still have 99.6 percent of left.

So, if I register a new domain, can I use this extra bandwidth and storage to make a forum?

I've been toying around with an idea for a modding community forum that wouldnt be game specific, and provide several services such as a place to promote mods, provide general modding discussion, have a place to post troubleshooting threads on any aspect of modding, have a dedicated "myspace" type of page for mods where teams can post info, videos, news updates, screenshots and etcetera and get comments from forum members. Plus recruiting boards, and general off-topic discussion.

I just played around with a vbulletin demo and essentially made the whole thing, excluding the mod-myspace page. So setting it up seems fairly easy.

I'm just wondering if this is possible, or if its one of those things where I'll end up way over my head.
 
Make a sex forum.

Make a music/guitar forum (ultimate-guitar forums are completely full. Of 13 year old retards, I'd like to go to a good one, where you could hold down an intelligent conversation)

Make a game/mod (not just mod, but game too)
 
moddb sucks. I hate the format. My site will destroy it.
 
Especially if you have sex somewhere on there.

(srsly, I'll mod 4 free)
 
So what alternatives are there to vbulletin? From what I saw of the demo, vbulletin is awesome and easy, but its so freaking expensive.
 
vbulletin is the best but some free ones: phpBB, SMF, punBB
 
Good luck buddy, i'll sign up! Give us a bell when you're kicking!
 
The only one I can really stand personally is vbulletin.

Though you can do like a member of my old guild did... he created his own proprietary forum code and it worked pretty well... but is super basic compared to vbulletin even though that was his goal to reduce bandwidth usage hogs.


And I'll certainly join if you get it up and running dude! I'd gladly be a moderator <wink wink>

Well, since I'll never be able to be one here.

1471733608823e25c236670qi2.jpg





And you could always look into free proprietary open source ones if there are any.
 
On second thoughts, always do the opposite of what Saturos says.
 
Adrien C said:
What is the actual prise of a Vbulletin license?
Click to expand...

$100 for a 1yr license, or 180 for an unlimited. If I were to get one, I'd do the unlimited one because renewing every year at 100 bucks is expensive as hell. If I get a job soon then I'll probably save up for that. In the meantime, i'll look at alternatives. And I'll definitely let you guys know when im looking for moderators.

Jintor said:
On second thoughts, always do the opposite of what Saturos says.
Click to expand...

You mean making people invisible so it seems less active?
 
It's a surefire way to succeed.
 
To be fair, that is because 80% of its userbase are idiots and 10% are people cashing in on those idiots.
 
I don't think I would hate myspace as much as I do if it didn't allow people to spam their own pages with shitloads of videos and sounds and pictures.

It's like a poorly put together website.
 
Krynn72 said:
So I have a personal site and the hosting package I got for it is way wayyyyy to much for how much traffic I see. Ive got 300 gigs of bandwidth and the most I have ever used is 11 gigs. I also have 300 gigs of storage, which i still have 99.6 percent of left.

So, if I register a new domain, can I use this extra bandwidth and storage to make a forum?

I've been toying around with an idea for a modding community forum that wouldnt be game specific, and provide several services such as a place to promote mods, provide general modding discussion, have a place to post troubleshooting threads on any aspect of modding, have a dedicated "myspace" type of page for mods where teams can post info, videos, news updates, screenshots and etcetera and get comments from forum members. Plus recruiting boards, and general off-topic discussion.

I just played around with a vbulletin demo and essentially made the whole thing, excluding the mod-myspace page. So setting it up seems fairly easy.

I'm just wondering if this is possible, or if its one of those things where I'll end up way over my head.
Click to expand...

www.modtheater.com I belong there. It has a myspacey thing like hl2.net with profiles and stuff.
 
You might want to roll some CMS on the front end and then link to a forum from it, that way you'll have a place for articles , pictures etc. I hate it when people make entire sites out of forums.

here are a few popular (Open source) CMS packages
http://www.joomla.org/
http://drupal.org/
http://typo3.com/

The beauty of open source software is that if your particular flavour of forum/cms is lacking a certain feature theres almost undoubtedly someone out there who has created it as an extension. You should be able to get a forum up and running with more or less the same functionality of VB.

edit: I would highly recommend using phpBB ,i've used it in the past and its got a pretty neat feature set.
 
phpBB is nice, i've used it a dozen times but it does have vaguely annoying limitations (especially now that phpbb3 is the standard, it doesnt have nearly the library of mods/themes that 2.x did yet).

I would strongly recommend sucking up the cost and purchasing a vB license, vB has CMS mods and is relatively easy (although so is phpBB) to reroute data thru a frontend whether it's a CMS or just a site you make. The money means you pay for very competent support, constant feature and security updates, and a huge community of mods and themes.

Major precaution I would worry about is making sure your site DOESN'T look like a prepackaged CMS, that screams noob and is sort of depressing. Halflife2.net uses Wordpress as a CMS but it's closely integrated with vBulletin for news / frontpage stuff.

also do not promise anybody with a moderator position, you will want to choose them from the community once it gets on its feet and how active / mature / motivated they are in that respect, not because they are your friends. it will just end with pissed off people otherwise.

I can help you out if there is anything you need helping out with in terms of forum configuration / modification, I've been running and setting up various forums since I was about 10 and I've used just about every free forum software there is many times and usually modded the hell out of it.
 
I was thinking about making a front page for the site, but I really dont want it to get too complicated. I'm really trying to make a site for the community to easily talk together and work with each other, rather than a "news" type of site where we post big releases and such on a front page. If I do go with a front page, it will be simple and clean to use, without bombarding people with information and screenshots/videos etc. The way I am envisioning it now, the front page will have site-related news posts, a link to the forums, and a search function for finding mods. Possibly a "featured mods" section with image-links to any exceptional mods that were posted (kind of like how CGSociety does it at the top of their forums) . Thats about it.

I'm not at all adept at this sort of thing, and frankly, I have no idea what this CMS thing you're talking about is. From what I read about it, it looks to be some sort of all-encompassing controller or something. But I still dont quite understand it. Is it like dreamweaver or frontpage, only free and browser-based? Do you use it to modify the visual layout of your site as well as the content?

My biggest concern is getting the modspace pages (hahahaha get it?!) to work right. I want them all to have the same layout, so I'm thinking it would be best to just have a form they fill out, typing information in the "Information" field, uploading screenshots to the "Screenshots" field, posting youtube links in the "Videos" field and etcetera.

Problem is, I have no idea how to do that. The rest of the forum-based stuff looks easy enough to figure out, front page shouldnt be too hard to work out, but the modspace I think will be difficult, because I want that front page search function to search through these pages for relevant mods.
 
a CMS (content management system) is essentially an opensource backend for your site. It doesnt have much to do with visual (thats up to you) it handles stuff like databases, article systems, news systems, integration with forums, etc. It's essentially a precoded organizational system, sort of like a forum, except for a website with content rather than a community.

the Modspace thing wouldnt be too difficult, you would have to do some custom modifications but there are a lot of people out there capable of that, altho you wont be able to do it yourself unless you learn php/html/css/mysql pretty quickly
 
I'll join, and I better be a mod since I put you in that one short story that I wrote. :mad:

Anyway, hope you do well. ;D
 
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