Does anyone have any recommendations for a free messagebaord service? (i.e. Ezboard.)
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I used to use phpBB back when I used to host my own forum and it worked just fine.
I meant a service that provided hosting as well, sorry for not being more specific. I like phpbb, but I don't have the cash to pay for hosting, I was thinking something along the lines of Ezboards, or Proboards.
phpBB is just not an option for us anymore, we're writing our own. I would go with a professional board hosting company if you cannot do that, because frankly the exploits are too widely known.
246,000 phpBB boards still show the scars of the last person to hit phpBB's exploits, and it seemed to be purely random who got hit and who didn't. We'll never use it again.
Clanbob has been using ezboard for a long time, I used to read them, and overall it seems to be OK, but it gets mass-attacked from time to time, and your members will need to donate if you want it ad-free. Beyond that, I don't know-- my page has never really outsourced it because our membership is integrated into the page. Well, it will be again, once it's restructured :)
I caught someone while they were in the middle of hacking mine. They changed a few forum titles when I got there, so I renamed the folder the forum was in, fixed everything up and then upgraded. There are other free boards though. Like Xmb. And for a "not ezboard" service, there's runboard.com .
Writing your own forum software? That sound drastic.
Well, our membership gets more than just the forum, they get easter egg and priviledged access to things like story notes and secrets. We originally had it set up to be compatible with the phpBB system, but we gave it a total overhaul once we'd had enough with people screwing with the phpBB exploits. Having the specifics of our board be private gives us a big advantage against script kiddies.
After the problems having the forum software talk to the login software caused, we knew we weren't giving any wide-release open source code access to the member system again. So that would mean our other option would be to use a board host. Making people create two separate logins for the same site just doesn't seem like a good idea anyhow, and the easter eggs are reeeeally popular. Plus, Jay is an excellent programmer so it's not actually that drastic for us.
I used http://www.tag-board.com/ when I did have a message board... it was okay but it generated pop-ups and every once in a while, like every week or so would quit out for a bit... actually it wasn't that good...
So i guess this is just a heads up of one to avoid... :P
I use PHPBB on several sites, the last exploit seemed mostly harmless and was easy to roll back (humorous even). As long as you stay on top of the latest releases you should be OK. I like it, mainly, because everyone knows how to use it out of the box. And it's so durned easy to admin.
You could always as Joey Manley for space at Talk About Comics and let him handle the headaches.
I have an Invision Power Board through forumer.com and I'm quite a fan of it. There's banner ads on each page (unless you pay), but there's no pop-ups and haven't had too much trouble with spam accounts (a few, but it just happened that i got like 10 spam accounts in a week on an older board there, and then they went away and never came back)
That looks pretty cool, like the Comicgenesis of Forums. Thank you for pointing that out. Can you only use phpbb and Invision Board, or can you use your own software if you have it?
i'm pretty sure it's just invision or phpbb
Another question, can a karma system (You know, where users can praise or smite each other.) be implemented on the Invision Boards? And if so, how would I go about doing this?
Drupal Is Working Well -
Anyone who is PHP/MySQL savvy might consider Drupal (what we're using on Comixpedia post 3/06) because (1) it isn't phpBB so far less security attacks and (2) it's far more flexible if you want to roll your own specialized version of it. Granted there are far more skins and doodads available for phpBB (and some other boards) but then see my point #1.
Just IMHO -
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Xaviar Xerexes
I am a Modern Major Generality.