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Old guy needs to start an online forum.

2

22Tango

macrumors newbie
Original poster
May 26, 2008
7
0
Central Texas
Greetings from Central Texas... I just joined your forum today.

(Background)
I bought my first Apple, LISA in 1983, so I am probably a lot older than most of you "young-uns" on this forum and I need some advice.

I found a few buddies of mine who served in Vietnam with an Army unit I was with. I purchased a domain on GoDaddy "www.538th.com" and I am mainly interested in starting a FORUM for Vietnam Vets who were assigned to my unit.

Although I have several Macs, ( a G4 DP QuickSilver and a new dual core iMac) I'd like to make a forum that old guys like me can maintain without too much grief. By that I mean, something not too technically challenging. I live on a farm in an isolated area and my ISP is WildBlue (satellite) and I don't get blistering fast speed. Mainly, I'd just like the ability where guys can post info and maybe links to photos they took while assigned to the 538th back in the 1960s and early 70s.

I shot a lot of home-movie footage in Vietnam, and I'll be posting my flicks to YouTube (I already have several on YouTube, look me up by typing in my monkier tuutuutango... Note, it is different than my moniker on this forum, 22Tango. If you go to my YouTube stuff, look at my last video and you'll see an entertaining movie of an airplane I built and flew on it's maiden voyage... You can find it by typing in "First Flight Experimental Avid Aircraft." It was a real-live airplane with avionics, a transponder, the works. Here is the direct link to that video... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWJUdhAmfvQ

Any tips you "young-uns" can provide in regard to making a forum will be greatly appreciated.

22Tango
 
Did you also purchase a web hosting package from Godaddy? If so, there are a few free add-on forum packages that you can literally just click to install and they'll take care of the rest.

Simple Machines, Vanilla Forum, YetAnotherForum

I would recommend Simple Machines. It's pretty robust. While it may be more than you're looking for, you'll grow into it - and for my money, it's a lot easier to start at the ground floor and grow into something than it is to find out three weeks from now that one needs more "oomph" without much "oomph" to be found by a software package that is too limited.

Single click installation (well, maybe two or three), Free, NO ADS (thus no fees to remove them - a biggy in my mind, as well as your users' minds), widely-used add-on that perhaps many of your users will already be familiar with. What more could one ask for?

Good luck!
 
Speaking as not a young one, but someone from your generation, the easiest way (even if the "designers" scoff at it) is iweb. You will be able to maintain the site with a few clicks and there is a ton of help from people like me and giavanino. I have a godaddy domain name that I publish on .mac. Nothing easier for someone who is just learning the ropes of website maintenance.
Best of luck
 
Mitou said:
Speaking as not a young one, but someone from your generation, the easiest way (even if the "designers" scoff at it) is iweb. You will be able to maintain the site with a few clicks and there is a ton of help from people like me and giavanino. I have a godaddy domain name that I publish on .mac. Nothing easier for someone who is just learning the ropes of website maintenance.
Best of luck
Click to expand...

Okay, so it is possible to have a forum as a part of your iweb site, hosted right on the site?

I've been trying to figure out how to do that, but I have an earlier version of iweb and am totally lost.
 
Actually iWeb can't create a forum. You can enable blog comments and have a make-shift forum, but as of earlier this year iWeb didn't have an actual forum function. Has something changed?
 
To be sure, iWeb, although simple as can be for a person who just wants to get nice looking pages up on the web, does not include in its templates or application scope anything approximating a functioning forum.

The original poster would still have to install forum software on his webhost and then link to it from an iWeb page.

EDIT: Beat to the punch again. Sorry for the duplicate info.
 
dtyson said:
Did you also purchase a web hosting package from Godaddy? If so, there are a few free add-on forum packages that you can literally just click to install and they'll take care of the rest.

Simple Machines, Vanilla Forum, YetAnotherForum

I would recommend Simple Machines. It's pretty robust. While it may be more than you're looking for, you'll grow into it - and for my money, it's a lot easier to start at the ground floor and grow into something than it is to find out three weeks from now that one needs more "oomph" without much "oomph" to be found by a software package that is too limited.


Good luck!
Click to expand...

I wouldn't use SimpleForums unless you want to get tons of forum spam. You need to upgrade to something commercial. i have had several simpleforums and all of them got tons of spam...

I would invest some money and get a more robust package, there is no free version that I know of that can stop the spammers.

GoDaddy's version is old, you will need to upgrade it and that isn't a 3 or 4 click item..

In fact all of GoDaddy's extra software you can install is outdated.
 
Tarlach said:
I wouldn't use SimpleForums unless you want to get tons of forum spam. You need to upgrade to something commercial. i have had several simpleforums and all of them got tons of spam...

I would invest some money and get a more robust package, there is no free version that I know of that can stop the spammers.

GoDaddy's version is old, you will need to upgrade it and that isn't a 3 or 4 click item..

In fact all of GoDaddy's extra software you can install is outdated.
Click to expand...

Simple Machines is not the same as SimpleForums. I think we're talking about a couple of different titles. I also think that one would find that the spam protection in Simple Machines (internal, captcha and via Askimet) works quite well, particularly if one is running a small closed forum with a small managed membership base.

Godaddy is currently hosting version 1.1.4. Simple Machines released 1.1.5 less than a month ago. Agreed that Godaddy could be a little quicker about updating but it's definitely not as bad as it used to be. They're doing much better. If you check release dates for just the forum software (all I looked at), you'll see Simple Machines is 1.1.4 (current: 1.1.5), YetAnotherForum is 1.9.1.7 (current: 1.9.1.8) and Vanilla Forum is 1.1.4 (current: 1.1.4). That's not all bad.

As you can see from the previous link, the Simple Machines update from 1.1.4 to 1.1.5 (should one choose to do) couldn't be more simple.

I hope this hasn't confused the original poster TOO much :D
 
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