Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website? 259
First time accepted submitter DustyMurray writes "I am considering adding forums to my website, and am just getting confused by all the options. My first reaction is always DIY. You get better website integration, and it looks and feels 100% how you want it to look and feel. However looking at things like phpBB and Vanilla forums, I will be hard pressed to build a better user experience in a reasonable amount of time. Also these out-of-the-box solutions seem to be shouting 'Easy to integrate with your website.' So, considering this, how easy are these ready build forums really to integrate? I want to be able to insert stuff on certain pages, so it's not either the forums, or my site... It must be a mix. I do not want a second login system on my site. And last but not least, I definitely don't want to have this typical generic look that most forums sport. Can all that be delivered with the out-of-the-box forums that exist today? Which one is the most flexible regarding these wishes?"
vBulletin (Score:5, Informative)
Seriously, building something like vBulletin would take you years with all the front-end and admin panel features. It is also customizable to every site so that it can look the same as your site (but maintains the usability users have adjusted to on other sites). This is also performance thing apart from features - you most likely lack the knowledge to make high performance forum as good as vBulletin guys have.
I've seen large sites that have connected their website with vBulletin, so it is possible. Not only that, but vBulletin actually has vBulletin Connect that lets you build your website around vBulletin. Some CMS (Content Management Systems) also support vBulletin directly.
One specific large site I use daily did convert from their proprietary system they had used for more than 10 years. vBulletin was their choice, and while it did take a few months to convert that old system, the forum now works much better and supports way more features that users like. If you are making a new site you can obviously do it correctly the first time and skip the conversion.
If you are doing this as work for a professional site, I would stay away from phpBB and other free solutions. While it's possible to use them, you don't get any support and they're hard to integrate exactly the way you want to. They also tend to lack on the features that something like vBulletin has.
vBulletin really is your best choice. It's a little pricy, but for what you get the price is more than justified.
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Re:vBulletin (Score:5, Informative)
As a user I would say don't use vBulletin. Sure it has some great features, but I hate using it.
phpBB has everything you need, a very active "addons" community, and is much nicer for users. Added benefit, it's free - takes about 10 minutes to get installed, and has enough features and options to keep you busy customizing/configuring for a while.
Re:vBulletin (Score:4, Informative)
Much more slower than vBulletin, less scalable, uglier, less user friendly and almost non-existing support.
Almost every phpBB I installed was ridden by spam and got hacked several times. I have given up on phpBB after 10 years of trying.
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I find vBulletin ugly compared to phpBB - as to scaleability/support/speed - I would ask what facts you have to back this up?
From what I know, vBulletin doesn't support Nginx or any database except MySQL which gives phpBB more options in terms of scaleability. Page render speed depends on the template so it can be as heavy or light as you want for both. Support you get what you pay for I suppose, but between the forums, irc, and the extensive documentation I've never had an issue finding what I needed.
The
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phpBB has everything you need, a very active "addons" community...
If by "addons" you mean security holes, sure. phpBB is legendary for the number of SQL injection holes that it has.
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Obviously, any user made mod in any system risks opening a security hole, so I recommend checking over the code for anything added.
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^This. I've not had an issue in any of my installs in quite some time. Addons are definitely hit and miss as it comes to security, but unless the OP has a high profile site he probably doesn't have to worry too much about becoming a target.
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*shudder* They may have patched holes and stuff, but god help you if you want to add modules to it. The "module" system is basically a fancy name for applying patches to a default install. There were no supported extensibility points, and my memory of the code was one of looking in horror at a poorly modularized mess.
Granted, my experience is with PHPBB2. Things may have improved with PHPBB3, but I doubt they've done more than polish the turd.
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3.x is a complete rewrite. They're different, incompatible software packages. It's because there was no hope of polishing the turd that was 2.x.
Re:vBulletin (Score:4)
Re:vBulletin, posted to Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?, has been moderated Funny (+1).
It is currently scored Normal (2).
Re:vBulletin, posted to Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?, has been moderated Informative (+1).
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Re:vBulletin, posted to Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?, has been moderated Overrated (-1).
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Re:vBulletin, posted to Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?, has been moderated Interesting (+1).
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Re:vBulletin, posted to Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?, has been moderated Insightful (+1).
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Re:vBulletin, posted to Ask Slashdot: What Is the Best Way To Add Forums To a Website?, has been moderated Flamebait (-1).
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Can I get an underrated? lol
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Hate to break it to you, but vBulletin gets hacked about as often as anything else out there. In the past 10 years, I've cleaned up about as many hacked vB forums for people as several of the other popular forum packages combined.
Sure, the primary issue is that people don't keep their software updated, but that is true no matter what software you use. I've setup and ran dozens of phpBB forums, and I have yet to have one hacked, but then I keep them (and the servers they run on) up-to-date.
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If Invision's paid board administration is anything like the free version's, I'd rather shoot myself in the head. Then again, it's been about 5 years since I had to adin one, so they've possibly gotten better.
Re:vBulletin (Score:5, Informative)
Re:vBulletin (Score:5, Interesting)
As a long time owner of a vB license, I second the motion to read about the history of vBulletin before making a decision to use their software. When IB bought Jelsoft, it went downhill rather quickly. Many would say, and I have to agree, that vB jumped the shark after the acquisition. Many of us who own and operate boards also agree that version 3.8.7 was the last good version. The management at Jelsoft/IB attempted to morph the software into a catchall social networking solution akin to Facebook, in my eyes anyway. Many of us who have or had "owned" licenses feel that we got screwed, for the terms in licensing changed dramatically beginning with version 4. It turned into a huge money grab in the eyes of many, including myself. Many customers went with other options, and some of us never updated beyond 3.8.7, and are looking for other solutions. Yes, I have tried versions 4 and 5, and they are horrid IMHO.
It should also be mentioned that some key vB developers left the company as well, for they agreed with many of the customers at that time, that Jelsoft had lost its way. Those developers who left, started to build their own forum software solution from scratch, which is called XenForo ( http://xenforo.com/ [xenforo.com] ), and is offered to the public as a paid option to forum software. IB got quite pissy over this, and filed multiple court cases against them, which has thus far proved to be fruitless, and appears to be simply a way to make XenFro bleed financially through litigation. http://xenforo.com/community/threads/a-statement-regarding-the-current-litigation.7567/ [xenforo.com]
I will say that I personally do not think that XenFro is quite yet up to snuff, when compared to older versions of vB, or other paid solutions. I do hold hope that one day soon it will be.
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In my case, when Jelsoft allowed "Owned" licenses and a "Brand Free" license some years back, I paid for them and I can't say I'm even looking to upgrade in the near future. My forums are so highly modified that it will be a while before I *have* to move on.
I haven't tried 4 or 5 but I have read enough about them to know not to waste money on them. I can't say I felt screwed when they changed their licensing changes - Nothing is forever and as with all software, when a major revision comes out I pay for an
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I have administrated a VB fourm and I honestly have never seen one single thing that made it stand out OTHER than the fact that it cost money, and its equals were free.
CMS? yup
Support? man those SMF guys have that nailed
Hard to integrate? not any worse than VB, your going to have to edit a file sometime
Features? out of the box yea VB, addons no, not even close
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another recommendation for SMF here. I run it on two forums and highly prefer it over both VBulletin and Phorum.
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I'd also recommend SMF, after having run PHPBB2, PHPBB3, Invision's free board, and having dabbled with a number of others.
Re:vBulletin (Score:4, Insightful)
The downside is it will be constantly full of porn+Viagra+poker spam.
The spammers have got their scripts for attacking all the popular bulletin boards down to a fine art...
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About 4 years ago I worked in the anti-spam industry. One of the groups (MAAWG) had a meeting that year and several large telco/ISP representives said that SMS and board spam was on their radar. It seems like it should be relatively trivial to run this stuff through the mail filter pipeline, wrap it up as a email (or even don't as long as your system treats the message like a mail body), grab the IP that it originates from and send it off to your reputation system and see if it pings. Anyone no of a mainstr
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I once tried blocking by IP address but with all the botnets out there it simply doesn't work.
Everything is relayed/proxied now. The days of being able to block Eastern Europe, Africa and most of Asia are long gone.
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That's when you ban the entire internet by default and set up a whitelist.
Works just fine for stopping proxyfags in their tracks on Camfrog.
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But wouldn't the proxies use a limited number of IPs? What happens with email spam is if you relay spam you get blacklisted. Hence people tend to close open relays and/or spammers have huge churn on the servers they can use. As for bots: throttling helps a lot with email spam wonder if it would work here. The company I worked for made an ISP grade anti-spam service that would throttle unknowns down to really slow connection speed, bots simply can't wait around for 10min sending a message. That said neither
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I use GeoIP to snag a country code and ban new accounts from CN and BD. That stopped 90% of spam.
I tweaked a few things in the board myself to add some extra hurdles for the spammers, but that means that updates are also a bit of a pain.
Some junk still gets through, but that's what moderators and pro-active administration is for. You can't run a board with no admin overhead.
Re:vBulletin (Score:5, Interesting)
My bulletin board/forum is spam-bot secure. Why? Video captcha of animated .GIFs. No spam bot can get through, you *NEED* a human to answer the captcha, as it's a question related to the GIF itself (example, display a short clip of Hajime no Ippo, where Ippo is performing the Dempsey Roll. The question will ask "What move is being performed here?")
Have fun making a bot with knowledge of every manga/anime ever made with enough horsepower to OCR everything.
Re:vBulletin (Score:5, Informative)
Uhm.. well I'm guessing it must be a forum about manga/anime, but as someone with more than a passing interest in anime, I still have no idea wtf you're talking about. And after Googling it, it doesn't look like one that I'd watch since I'm not that interested in boxing.. so yeah. Maybe you should choose something that any human could answer, rather than get so specific? Very few people are interested in every single manga/anime out there, considering that a lot of them have very different target audiences.
Re:vBulletin (Score:5, Insightful)
Glad I never tried to sign up there. I am no idiot, and I like anime, but even if I *could* figure such a thing out, I can't imagine I would take the time and effort to do so. I might run a few google searches, but I have doubts that that would be enough to find it.
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We don't allow subtitles in the GIF. The GIFs are usually from shit everyone has seen, with maybe a couple of obscure ones we use for repeat captcha solving failures (usually by bots.) Allowing text kinda gives the bots something to latch onto to try to solve. Example, the Dempsey Roll I mentioned above. We had text. A bot solved it but failed because it also included the exclamation points (which the answer held none.) After that, we knew to use images only without text.
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Re:vBulletin (Score:4, Insightful)
What about accessibility? Are you blocking those who have vision problems? :(
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The best I've seen yet is snail mail. You send a stamped self addressed envelope to the board maintainer and they mail a password back. You use the login name you supplied to them and log on.
It is the most spam free board you can imagine.
Oh that was on a Fidonet BBS. ;)
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My bulletin board/forum is spam-bot secure. Why? Video captcha of animated .GIFs. No spam bot can get through, you *NEED* a human to answer the captcha, as it's a question related to the GIF itself (example, display a short clip of Hajime no Ippo, where Ippo is performing the Dempsey Roll. The question will ask "What move is being performed here?")
Have fun making a bot with knowledge of every manga/anime ever made with enough horsepower to OCR everything.
Every gif file has a name, filesize, hash, etc... and with a few bucks and the Mechanical Turk, I bet they can map one of these unique identifiers to the answers to your captcha, and hello spam city! I'm guessing you're really experiencing security through obscurity, which isn't real security.
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Hell of an idea. Put pictures of porn actresses and ask "Who's this?" Whoever doesn't know is either a bot, or unworthy of your board, heh heh.
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Writing a program that solves a Calcudoku is pretty simple, actually. Hell, a 6x6 only has a couple hundred possibilities; that's a piece of cake to brute-force. I think right now you're more relying on security through obscurity -- it's not been broken because it's not yet used often enough to be a tempting target for a spambot creator.
Be Careful (Score:2, Insightful)
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Yep. If you modify anything in the code your life will be a constant battle of re-integrating your changes into every new release that appears.
Begging the question (Score:3, Insightful)
Should you add a forum to a web site? Are you ready to moderate it, defend it against spammers and irate users, manage lost passwords and deal with intellectual property disputes? A forum doesn't sleep, a forum doesn't go on holiday.
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A forum doesn't sleep, a forum doesn't go on holiday. :-)
I think you might be new here, on Slashdot.
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A forum doesn't sleep, a forum doesn't go on holiday. :-)
I think you might be new here, on Slashdot.
It always amuses me when people complain about how Slashdot has gotten worse in some way, or changed focus. No, it hasn't. I waited a long time before getting an account here because at the time, there was no real benefit to having an account. And then the 'first post' idiots started up. Other than that, this is the way Slashdot has always been.
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Should you add a forum to a web site? Are you ready to moderate it, defend it against spammers and irate users, manage lost passwords and deal with intellectual property disputes? A forum doesn't sleep, a forum doesn't go on holiday.
This.
I once ran one for about two weeks then turned it off in disgust. It wasn't worth the effort for the return it gave me. Bulletin boards bring out the worst of the Internet.
(Especially the popular ones - the spammers are constantly scanning for them and have attack scripts lined up and ready to go. Captchas won't help...they have minimum-wage people sat all day long solving captchas)
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It's his website, he apparently already requires users to log in ('doesn't want another login on his site').
If it were a public site I'd agree with you, but as a somewhat protected area on the "intertubes" he should be OK.
Drupal (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Drupal (Score:4, Interesting)
I'd warn against Drupal. Since it leverages the rather hefty node structure in Drupal, it's very hard to scale up properly. For a forum like what you've linked, with less than a thousand posts, that's fine, but a forum with tens of thousands of posts slows down to a crawl where phpBB or other dedicated forum solutions have no issue running.
I'm sure you can optimize Drupal further, but it requires a lot more work than using a straight, if not integrated, forum package.
Re:Drupal (Score:4, Informative)
The truth is that any site with > 10k authenticated users a month and 100k+ user generated posts is going to need performance tuning.
Here is an example of.... (Score:3)
...what you may have to deal with.... This forum board has been closed for quite some time and still I get tons of registrations....
http://abstractionphysics.net/phpBB2/ [abstractionphysics.net]
Maybe consider contributing to a honeypot should you chose to pursue a forum. https://www.projecthoneypot.org/ [projecthoneypot.org]
Take all the recommendations you get here ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Take all the recommendations you get here ...and then:
(1) Get the number of CERT advisories for each of them
(2) Get the percentage market share of each one of them
(3) Calculate (#2 * 100) / #1
(4) Whoever is left with the largest number, pick that one
For example, the calculation above for bbPress, which is a WordPress plugin, would also need to take into account the number of WordPress only CERT advisories, plus those for any plugins besides bbPress you felt it necessary to use, and the resulting number would let you write off using bbPress. Likewise, anything that used Java as an implementation detail would probably get written off due to the number of security holes which have been found in Java. Anything with an SQL back end would have to take into account SQL injections for the other components you intended to use, and so forth.
Ideally, you would probably put your forums on an isolated machine, rather than hosting everything on one machine, which would drastically reduce the attack surface -- and this would become pretty crystal clear to you after you performed the calculation exercise.
Re:Take all the recommendations you get here ... (Score:4, Insightful)
1) You seem to know nothing about Java and JVM security. It is immaterial what language you are using on the server-side, Java is no more or less secure than any other.
2) What difference does it make what the market share of a piece of software is. It is either SECURE or NOT SECURE. If it is not secure then it doesn't matter if one person uses it or 3 million, it is still not secure.
When evaluating the security of a web application there are many considerations (I've actually taught web app security courses and done all this stuff). You should certainly look at how many advisories there are on a given product. You should also see when these happened, how they were resolved, etc. It may be better to use an application that has had numerous issues that have been promptly fixed for instance. How easy are updates to roll out? How soon do fixes come out? Can you review the source code to look for good coding practices and engineering? As for SQL does the product EVER use anything but bind params? If it does construct dynamic SQL that's a red flag, but it MAY be OK if ALL input parameters are carefully cleaned (bonus points of something like perl's taint mode is in use). Ideally you'd also want to run a full security scan against your test install with a good fuzzer and see what happens. If you can easily shake out bugs yourself then that's a red flag too.
In other words you really can't sort out the security of an application by any simple formula, and certainly you need to use the right considerations. Anyone interested in getting more detailed advice would do well to start with something like OWASP https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Main_Page [owasp.org]
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1) You seem to know nothing about Java and JVM security. It is immaterial what language you are using on the server-side, Java is no more or less secure than any other.
I only gave it as an example of a potential attack surface; it depends on how the scripting engine based on the back end works, and if it's injectable. I've seen code snippets for Java code handed back to the back end, with the code handed back being in the front end web page. An attack on that, even for a serialized object, is as simple as writing a transcoding proxy to substitute your serialized objects for the intended serialized objects, thereby compromising the back end JVM. I'd also point out that
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Well, I don't know of any study or generally accepted theory in webapp security that jibs with your model. I don't think it is a bad THEORY as a sort of very general idea, but I don't think you can apply a formula. Different applications tend to end up in different verticals, some are bigger targets than others for instance. Just because an application is targeted more than another and has a smaller overall global user base doesn't NECESSARILY make it less secure. It would be something to look at, but I'd w
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Flatfile and SSD.
Re:Take all the recommendations you get here ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, because changing your entire back-end architecture is a more logical move than escaping your strings or using parameterized queries or any of the other tools that can not only eliminate SQL injection vulnerabilities, but often make the code easier to write and read.
Invision (Score:3, Interesting)
In the last decade I was using Invision forum software not only because it was a very nice alternative to vbulletin and phpBB but it also seemed quite popular as well. They do have a demo for the Community Suite here - http://www.invisionpower.com/demo/ [invisionpower.com] if you want to try it out.
phpBB (Score:2)
are you on a sheared box for you web hosting? (Score:2)
are you on a sheared box for you web hosting?
If so they and it's forum with a lot of users can slow things down a lot / get you kicked off.
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You mean a Brazilian? [wikimedia.org]
Depends on what you want (Score:2)
PhpBB has a ton of features, but is a bit slow and bulky. I feel it's easy to work with, but it's probably not the easiest out there.
VanillaForums are extremely simply but lack some features (though many of these can be "bought").
vBulletin has a lot of niceties, but can be a bit of a hog and doesn't come cheap.
There is also SMF (Simple Machine Forums) which I've been told is a cross between phpBB and Vanilla Forums, but I haven't personally used it.
If you're
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And this might be a great way to "try out" Vanilla Forums - Turnkey Linux Vanilla Forums appliance [turnkeylinux.org]...
Wind up a VM, give it a shot, and see if it works for you.
There are similar VMs for punBB [turnkeylinux.org], phpBB [turnkeylinux.org], SimpleMachines [turnkeylinux.org] and other messaging forums
you're posting this question on a forum... (Score:3, Funny)
Do they no longer give away slashcode?
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They probably do, and even if they don't, you can always get a snapshot of the time they distributed it (if so, you can go all the way back into the time it used to work). It is free software, what means it can't be just revoked.
Now, why would he choose to run slashcode, I can't even imagine.
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Considering there hasn't been a release since 2006 [sourceforge.net] or a commit since 2009 [sourceforge.net] I'd say no, they don't really.
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Considering there hasn't been a release since 2006 [sourceforge.net] or a commit since 2009 [sourceforge.net] I'd say no, they don't really.
Incidentally 2006 was also the last year the slashdot interface was at all useable according to most hard core slashdotters.
Depends (Score:4, Insightful)
There are multiple very good forum software projects, and I have no clear preference. phpBB and SMF are good standalone solutions; Drupal is powerful if you're looking to have much more than a forum. LAMP (as in PHP/MySQL) is by far the most popular technology. Ruby and Python might be more stylish, but most of the PHP software has had years of continual improvement. Best get several of them (Wikipedia has a complete list) and try them out locally for comparison.
Only two things I'd recommend against:
- First, on absolutely no account try to write your own from scratch. The best projects now available have been in development for almost ten years (more in some cases). This is an extremely complex application with many pitfalls in design, database architecture, extendability, and security. If you were the best programmer in the world, it would take you months of constant testing and bugfixing before you had anything approaching stability; and you'd spend the coming years finding security holes and fixing design mistakes.
- Second, avoid commercial solutions if possible. They're not usually better. Also, you should factor in not just the purchase price but the continual costs of upgrades and user-contributed addons. One good commercial board I've worked with is IPB, but that's only in recent versions after years of development - and I still prefer phpBB.
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Which means they have a gazillion features (and risks stemming from those) you don't need. I mean seriously, what pitfalls are there? Don't be a derp when it comes to storing passwords or SQL injections, disallow HTML/Javascript, (simply bulldoze over the < and > implement a subset of the stuff from bbcode et al you need, more or less do
The Forum Matrix (Score:5, Interesting)
It catalogues tons of closed and open-source forum products coded by dozens of variables, and lets you compare them in a big matrix. Very useful if you have constraints/preferences like "works with SQL server" or "isn't PHP", etc.
My main complaint about it is that some of the data are out-of-date, but it is still a great starting point.
If you're serious about growing it... (Score:2, Informative)
then vBulletin is your only way to go. SMF, phpBB, Yabb.... I've seen forum owners start with all of them, and when their forum is actually successful, they end up migrating to vBulletin because it just works. The pricing is reasonable, the features are there, and so is the support, which you'll eventually need.
On the other hand, if you are just opening a small support forum for a product you sell or if you intend specifically to keep it from growing too big, then sure, look at phpBB, its pretty good.
Interesting joelonsoftware article on this... (Score:3, Insightful)
DIY? (Score:2)
My first reaction is always DIY
So, when you got your first car, you first thought was to build it yourself?
The first rule of building stuff is, Don't Reinvent the Wheel. That is especially true in software development, a field that has more than its share of really great wheelwrights.
Simple Machines (Score:4, Informative)
SMF - http://www.simplemachines.org/ [simplemachines.org]
what I use and with the GIGANTIC plugin support it's amazing. I never get spam problems, I have SMF set to use my wordpress logins for authentication, which means my wordpress uses Akismet to block spam therefore SMF uses it also since SMF users are set to be same as my wordpress users. Uses same database for logins.
Which sounds like what you are looking for, users log in to your website means they are logged in to both wordpress and smf with 1 account automatically.
SMF forums also have "bulletproof security" plugins similar to Wordpress that monitor sql threats, use 301 redirects and htaccess to shore up any problems it may think can happen.
course nothing is 100% but I love SMF and it's huge versatility, offers more plugins and themes than other stuff like phpbb/vbulletin. And my opinion is more secure when merged with sites like wordpress using Akismet for accounts.
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SMF2WP - A Wordpress plugin that ties the 2 together.
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SMF2WP is a simple one way bridge from Simple Machine Forum (v2.0.1 tested) to WordPress (v3.2.1 tested). This means, this one uses databases of SMF Forum and sync to WP database every time a user performs log-in action in both WP and SMF. To get this working, it is highly recommended that you have a fresh install of WordPress with an install of SMF. Also, WP and SMF must be installed in same domain, and should not be being accessed through a su
Simple Machines Forum (Score:2)
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newsgroups (Score:2)
Every time I see a forum all I find is web interfaces that are trying to imitate newsgroups. But they do it so poorly. I would give anything to have half the functionality of newsgroups in a forum. I totally understand that a web interface for nntp would cause its own problems but I have to wonder if a web interface on a nntp backend might be easier to develop than these forums that are trying to replace it's functionality.
I have wanted Slashdot to offer up a NNTP server for more than 12 years. If they did
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Just curious what functionality you see nntp providing. I don't see anything at all myself. The only thing tying threads together is the subject lines. A forum OTOH is easily navigable, you have server side search, you know that everyone is presented with the same posts at the same time, you have more than one level of categorization, mods can move posts that idiots put in the wrong place, edit and remove highly objectionable content and flamebat, etc.
Don't get me wrong. I love nntp for what I use it for (d
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Killfile. The ability to use regex to score anything in any direction. The sweet sweet Killfile.
NNTP Newsgroup (Score:2)
I truly dislike Web-based forums. They require the user to connect to a specific Web site, which is sometimes down. Although Facebook is rarely down, a forum based there requires users to have Facebook accounts; similar requirements exist for other forum hosting services. Threaded discussions are often difficult to follow on Web-based forums, and threads usually cannot be sorted (both are also problems with mailing lists). To find a specific topic or thread, the user must use the forum's own search capa
Don't do what we did. (Score:3)
Our club went with a turnkey site host (wild apricot). We didn't ask enough questions about their forums. Here's some of the things we forgot.
Support for videos and pictures in posts. Should be at least as easy as blogger.com.
The ability to host the pics and videos on storage we control. Sites like picasa, snapfish, or even YouTube may not be around forever.
A versatile engine to search old posts.
The ability to backfill or forum history from our previous site.
The ability to export forum archives from the new site in a format useful to backfill some future provider's forum.
I also miss having a way to migrate or reformat old forum threads into wiki articles.
Maybe your users don't post things that have archival value. If so, then they are easier to support.
Disqus (Score:4, Informative)
http://disqus.com/ [disqus.com]
Customize it with CSS... call it a day. Forums are just pages with styled links. Your server doesn't suffer the load... the federated login is handled by others...
Google Groups - Mixed Integration Results (Score:2)
Keep it up to date!! (Score:3)
Next I love a consistent look and feel as it seems so do you. So when you customize the forum make sure that you do it through their plug-in/addon/template system and don't just reach into the code to customize it. The simple reason is the first part of what I wrote. You will want to keep that puppy up to date and this will then wipe out your changes if you don't do it through the "approved" way. Once you start noodling their code you will then be tempted to delay an upgrade while you insert your changes in their new code. Don't! Some of the holes in various forums allow evil doers to pwn your machine. (insert offensive saying as to just how pwned it will be). Also keep in mind these evil doers run automated scripts making lists of machines that they can someday pwn.
Slashcode? (Score:3)
My experience w/ Invision Power, Jive & vBulle (Score:2)
IPBoard (the forum application from Invision power) is highly customizable. You can write a login module for it to integrate with any identity management system. It is written in
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A commercial (or open source) forum suite has had way more eyes looking at it than your home-brewed solution.
That's both good (theoretically better code) and bad (large-scale attacks when some exploit is out in the wild). In practice, a decent programmer can write a safe, simple forum for themselves easily, while they will get hit regularly by exploits in phpBB etc. if they just trust such solutions instead.
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+1 for Google Groups, it removes A LOT of the hassle of managing forum for a site, especially for spam management (spam prevention logic is global across all the forums they host, if someone is detected spamming in one forum it can be nuked from everywhere at once).
I use it quite successfully for a few sites.
Google even allows EMBEDDING the page via an iframe, with an url that will not load the usual Google Groups page header:
use this in iframe src:
hxxps://groups.google.com/forum/embed/?place=___INSERT_FORUM_PATH_HERE___?showsearch=true&showpopout=true&hl=___INSERT_THE_UI_LANGUAGE_CODE_HERE__&parenturl=___INSERT_HERE_THE_URL_OF_THE_PARENT_LOADING_PAGE
(replace hxxps with https)
https://support.google.com/groups [google.com]
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can you post any example implementations?
one thing I can't see immediately is the ability to manage subgroups.
e.g.
My company
-product1
-product2
would you have to set up multiple groups to do this?
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+1 for Google Groups, it removes A LOT of the hassle of managing forum for a site, especially for spam management (spam prevention logic is global across all the forums they host, if someone is detected spamming in one forum it can be nuked from everywhere at once).
I was going to post saying that in my experience Google Groups is full of spam, there's often a lot more spam threads than content threads.
Going to check this: if you use the "new interface" then the spam threads are blocked, but on the "old interface" they are not blocked. But sadly the new interface is horrible and the old interface is great (in my opinion of course). I'm going to request old interface with spam protection :)
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You're a dick. We should ban people from posting LMGTFY links on Slashdot just like we did on stackoverflow.
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I put bbPress on my site a while back. It doesn't have all of the features of some other boards, but it is free and pretty easy to customize. I was able to integrate the logins of my site, my blog, and my boards without too much hassle.
I second this, especially the integrated login which is quite nice. Additionally, bbPress is very easy to customize the appearance, if you're willing to get your hands a little dirty in the process. As an example: Asylum Walls [darkicon.com], a forum I rebuilt for a friend, just to illustrate that you can change every tiny graphical detail. That forum was previously a plain, ugly black-on-white "theme" (to use the term loosely). The limits, as with anything that is heavily customizable, are your imagination and time.
Yeah,
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Mailing lists are worse. The mail keeps coming in whether you want to go idle for a while or not. It floods your mailbox (need to get a separate one just for this). And for those with a need to answer support questions, it inundates new users with all the other traffic. I don't use mailing lists anymore except for closed groups such as developers of a project.
Web forums can be great if they are managed well. But it is a near full time job, 7 or 8 days a week, 33 to 36 days a month, 400 days a year.
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It's less effort to just let Slashdotters decide.
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4chan......attract the best.
Might want to double check your definition of "best"