Forum Software Roundup

[leeza]

The 'forum' or 'discussion board' plays a major part on most successful Websites, providing a place for regular visitors to discuss topics the site covers. This creates a community and adds 'stickiness' to your site, giving people an incentive to come back time and time again. Take a look at the many hundreds of thousands of Websites with forums, and you'll see that various systems are employed to provide the discussion board features – posting, voting, private messaging, and thread categories, all of which play a part in the standard feature list for the big forum systems.

In this article, I'll download, install and set up 5 of the biggest and more popular forum applications.

I've chosen the systems based on the lists at Hotscripts.com, and my own past experience and knowledge. I have only chosen free systems, as that it is what most Website owners use, and because of the difficulty involved in acquiring copies of paid for systems for review. As a consequence of this approach, I've had to leave out the extremely popular vBulletin. I have also chosen PHP, ASP and CGI systems to give you as wide a choice as possible as you decide which system you want to go for.



floating tanks
Puppy Pictures

[sajiv]

Thanks for your feedback about the forum