One of the last things I did during this year’s Linux Experience was to try out some discussion board software before deploying it to Sunpig. I’ve been meaning to play around with this for a while, but it was only really last week that I found an incentive.
Richard had set up a chat board on EZBoard for his friends to hang out. But EZBoard’s free service throws huge banner, footer and popup ads at you, and their member signup forms are possibly the most deceptive I’ve ever seen. (One wrong click, and who knows how many mailing lists you’re on.) Also, the free service only lasts for so long before you have to upgrade to their paid service, and that time had come…
So, knowing that I have a bunch of space and bandwidth here on Sunpig, and the ability to install and run my own scripts, PHP, MySQL databases, etc. (through EZPublishing–our excellent web hosts), I offered to set up a board right here.
And just a few days later, it was up and running! The board runs on phpBB, which is a breeze to set up and get going. (I had a look at phpNuke as well, but phpBB is more lightweight, simpler, does all the basic stuff nicely enough, and has some spiffy default templates to go with it.)
If you want to come along and hang out, the board is at http://discuss.sunpig.com/brunton/. Note that it’s Richard’s board, not mine, but he says his intention was that he would invite his friends along to it, and then they would invote friends of their own. So just tell Rich that I sent you 😉