Building a forum

We are looking for building a Forum web application dedicated to specific problems that some our clients have to solve daily. The goal is to make it become THE PLACE TO FIND SOLUTIONS IN THEIR SPECIFIC DOMAIN. We want it to be Free of charge for any user (maybe for a limited time) and use this forum as a “Marketing tool” to introduce other projects we want to put in place later on (for a fee this time). As far as I know, there is no such forum for them. Users from around the world could benefit from it since they are using these “machines” worldwide.

We would be grateful to those who would give us advice or hints about the marketing aspect, the programming of forums or anything else that you might find useful.

Thanks in advance!

Roger

GOOGLE… there are hundreds of commerical forum packages available, that can be configured to your specific needs

Ok, Are they highly customizable? I’ll take a look, I guess it would be good place to start to gauge the interest for such a tool. Any one of all these packages stand out of the crowd?

Thanks!

I’ve taken a look at this review site which reviews some forum engines free and paid. They seem to like a lot “Simple Machine”, a free PHP software using MySQL…

Since only you know your specific requirements, then only you can make an assessment of the available packages, and determine if any specific ones meet your requirements.

I maintain a number of forums and I use phpbb which most internet website providers provide as installation packages which saves a lot of messing about. I also use the forum software integrated into some websites using the content on the main web pages allowing an easy way to maintain site content - as it is held in a MySQL database. The forums are fully customisable and the learning curve isn’t too great. https://www.phpbb.com/ and it is really well supported by their community. I use an additional package to ‘customise’ how the forums look, namely http://www.artisteer.com/

Prior to this XOJO forum the other forums were also using phpbb, http://forums.realsoftware.com/index.php

Great Thanks! I’ll search for the “rare pearl” among all the options. I’ll surely take a look at phpbb.com. It is important for me that the software gives me the opportunity to customize its look so the users feel at home…

Thanks for sharing!

I’m not a big fan of phpbb, but it is commonly used.

Here are a few others you might want to check out:

I use Vanilla Forums.
Free if you download and host yourself.
https://vanillaforums.org/