Post by Axel Tripier on Feb 1, 2014 8:29:19 GMT -5
Hi,
First, sorry for my bad English, I'm not a native speaker.
Then, it's a bad idea to use a "freeforums" forum for the Neptune Pine "fan" forum. There are a lot of companies like "freeforums" that allow people to easily create forums, and that simplifies the administrator work by providing pre-installed themes, plugins, ...
Those solutions are really cool for small communities, to easily have a place to talk about a subject, ...
BUT it has a lot of disadvantages too :
- There are ads on the forums, and all the ads revenue goes to the company hosting the forum (here, "freeforums").
- Once there are a lot of members and topics on the forum, it's really painful to switch to another solution: companies like freeforums love to keep big forums, because a lot of people = lots of ad revenue. So they usually don't give access to the database hosting all the forums posts, ... and the migration has to be done manually. That usually mean "start over a new better forum somewhere else, and lose half of the members in the process"
- The customisation of the forum is limited to what the company offers. You want this special theme or plugin or feature, or you want to add "intelligent" pages (like with PHP inside), or you want to integrate the forum in a fully featured website? Well too bad, you can't.
- All your messages, mail address, private informations are stocked on the company's servers. They can theoretically do whatever they want with them. The only thing preventing them to do so is the terms and conditions agreement. But have you read it? Do you know if there is a section inside that prevent them to do use your personal datas?
- There are a lot of other disadvantages, but I've listed only the main disadvantages.
You may find it really easy to create a small forum using freeforums because we are now a really small community. But I hope that the community will become bigger and bigger with time. And the community will hopefully have great ideas for the Pine. Ideas that will for some require a website, and/or special pages/special plugins on the forum. And if we are stuck on a solution that allow only to have a limited forum with ads on it and really limited customization features, we'll be screwed.
Of course there are better solutions, and I recommend you to use them really fast (imho you don't want this forum to become very active, as it will make the migration really painful):
The best solution I see for you at this moment is to host your own forum on a free website hosting solution, like "www.000webhost.com/". I'm telling you this one because it's the most famous, but there are others available if you want.
Disadvantages:
- It will be a bit more difficult to install, as you'll have to install a forum solution by yourself. But trust me, it's really easy to do so, so it's not a big disadvantage.
Advantages:
- No ads.
- No limitations in the customisation of the forum.
- You are really well prepared to migrate to a bigger hosting whenever you need to do so, because you have a complete access to the databases and the forum files.
- The possibility to create a website, some special pages, ... alongside the forum.
- ...
Such a solution would be free, like freeforums, but as you can see it will be much better. An even better solution would be to pay for a VPS/dedicated server, as you'll be able to modify the PHP/MySQL/... configuration server-side. But we don't really need that now.
I'm the administrator of a 15600+ members forum, and I know a lot of forums that are stuck on free forums services like freeforums and that really regret that, so trust me, I know what I'm talking about, and I don't want this to happen to our community.
I can provide help on which forum software to use, and with the setup of the new forum on a web hosting service, if you choose to follow my advice (do it, really, it's for our good!). And to be clear, I don't ask for anything in exchange for my help.
I can also give you (and manage for you) a VPS for free to host the forum/a website/..., as I have many dedicated servers. It won't bother me to give a few hundreds of Mb of disk and Ram for such an awesome community
Yours sincerely,
Axel Tripier - Proud backer of the Neptune Pine
First, sorry for my bad English, I'm not a native speaker.
Then, it's a bad idea to use a "freeforums" forum for the Neptune Pine "fan" forum. There are a lot of companies like "freeforums" that allow people to easily create forums, and that simplifies the administrator work by providing pre-installed themes, plugins, ...
Those solutions are really cool for small communities, to easily have a place to talk about a subject, ...
BUT it has a lot of disadvantages too :
- There are ads on the forums, and all the ads revenue goes to the company hosting the forum (here, "freeforums").
- Once there are a lot of members and topics on the forum, it's really painful to switch to another solution: companies like freeforums love to keep big forums, because a lot of people = lots of ad revenue. So they usually don't give access to the database hosting all the forums posts, ... and the migration has to be done manually. That usually mean "start over a new better forum somewhere else, and lose half of the members in the process"
- The customisation of the forum is limited to what the company offers. You want this special theme or plugin or feature, or you want to add "intelligent" pages (like with PHP inside), or you want to integrate the forum in a fully featured website? Well too bad, you can't.
- All your messages, mail address, private informations are stocked on the company's servers. They can theoretically do whatever they want with them. The only thing preventing them to do so is the terms and conditions agreement. But have you read it? Do you know if there is a section inside that prevent them to do use your personal datas?
- There are a lot of other disadvantages, but I've listed only the main disadvantages.
You may find it really easy to create a small forum using freeforums because we are now a really small community. But I hope that the community will become bigger and bigger with time. And the community will hopefully have great ideas for the Pine. Ideas that will for some require a website, and/or special pages/special plugins on the forum. And if we are stuck on a solution that allow only to have a limited forum with ads on it and really limited customization features, we'll be screwed.
Of course there are better solutions, and I recommend you to use them really fast (imho you don't want this forum to become very active, as it will make the migration really painful):
The best solution I see for you at this moment is to host your own forum on a free website hosting solution, like "www.000webhost.com/". I'm telling you this one because it's the most famous, but there are others available if you want.
Disadvantages:
- It will be a bit more difficult to install, as you'll have to install a forum solution by yourself. But trust me, it's really easy to do so, so it's not a big disadvantage.
Advantages:
- No ads.
- No limitations in the customisation of the forum.
- You are really well prepared to migrate to a bigger hosting whenever you need to do so, because you have a complete access to the databases and the forum files.
- The possibility to create a website, some special pages, ... alongside the forum.
- ...
Such a solution would be free, like freeforums, but as you can see it will be much better. An even better solution would be to pay for a VPS/dedicated server, as you'll be able to modify the PHP/MySQL/... configuration server-side. But we don't really need that now.
I'm the administrator of a 15600+ members forum, and I know a lot of forums that are stuck on free forums services like freeforums and that really regret that, so trust me, I know what I'm talking about, and I don't want this to happen to our community.
I can provide help on which forum software to use, and with the setup of the new forum on a web hosting service, if you choose to follow my advice (do it, really, it's for our good!). And to be clear, I don't ask for anything in exchange for my help.
I can also give you (and manage for you) a VPS for free to host the forum/a website/..., as I have many dedicated servers. It won't bother me to give a few hundreds of Mb of disk and Ram for such an awesome community
Yours sincerely,
Axel Tripier - Proud backer of the Neptune Pine