The matter of a message board comes up here from time to time. It’s also been mentioned during chat, and I figured you should understand the situation.
I’ve wanted a forum from the start. My original choice was not WordPress, but software called Drupal. It had a package of features, including a message board.
While I was getting a handle on it (Drupal had a steep learning curve), though, Dale took a look “under the hood”, and didn’t like what he saw. He had some issues with security and overhead, and a couple other things.
We went around on it, but eventually I gave in, and my second choice, WordPress, was installed. Unfortunately, WP is pretty stripped down, and comes without extra features.
So to add anything new, you have to find a third-party plugin. That’s not always easy, especially as there weren’t many board mods out there. We do have one possible, but Dale has yet to give it a thorough checkout.
I know what you’re thinking: why not just put up a separate board? That’s exactly what I want to avoid. A separate board would mean a separate login. And not many would want to login twice on the same site.
Inevitably, traffic would move to the boards, and the blog comments would die out. I don’t want that to happen.
If we were still on open comments, a separate board would be feasible. Unfortunately, that just puts far too many spambot posts in the moderation queue, and was why I had to require login for comments. We still get some spam posts, but they’re few in number (much fewer) now.
So that’s where we are right now on the message board matter. You want one, I want one, we all want one. I bug Dale periodically about it. And one of these days, I hope, we’ll have a message board. Meanwhile, we make do with what we have.
With putting up my own forums recently, I’ve discovered just how nasty those spambots can be. Even with a (simple) Captcha.
Also, if Scorpia puts up a forum, she will need one for just Presto to use.
My forum is small (10ish users) so take this with a grain of salt…
I use a simple phpbb forum. I installed a mod I found on the php site which sets the forum to “invite only”. There is some work in getting people signed up, but it works perfect to eliminate the spambot nonsense. Php has other issues and/or things to dislike, but it’s also widely used, and as a result, has a great deal of support and mods out there.
I don’t think a second login is all that big of a deal. But that’s just me… maybe other folks find it too annoying.
Oh, I forgot, blog comments wouldn’t die out if you create a post relating to the entry and then link to the forum post from the blog entry. Many sites do this and it works very well.
Good to hear your still looking into forums Scorpia.
I seen some interesting setups done over the years.
I seen nuke sites setup as blogs sites and also forums too. I seen one guy, dont remember who now, that use forum as a blog. The forum he used has some kind of summery(sp?) system; and he places that in a webframe on his main page. It looked just like a normal blog, but he ran thru his forums.
I hope that made since– still cross-eyed this morning. lol
Have you looked at http://www.ubbcentral.com/ I have seen many companies use it. Good Luck.
Thanks, Tyg. I’ll check out the ubb thing. It’s been awhile since I looked around at what’s out there. Maybe later this week (what’s left of it) or this weekend. Weather is supposed to clear up by then. I hope.
Linking the blog to a forum would be the way to go, but not sure how flexible WordPress is for linking to an external forum. You read the blog, but when you click on the comments it takes you to the forum to put your comments. Then you can have subforums for other topics.
Hey Scorpia,
Have your tech guy look at http://www.dotnetblogengine.net/ and see if that interest him.
A lot of things can be done with ASP.net.