Blog / Forum Developemnt

Discussion boards, aka forums or BBS or Bulletin Boards or Message Boards or Community Forums (etc), have always been popular. They are also a good way of getting return visitors to your site, since people tend to return to check for responses to their messages.

The BBSes listed on this page are the PHP versions. If you want Perl versions, please see the Free Message Boards (Forums, BBS, Bulletin Boards, Discussion Boards) Perl CGI Scripts page instead. Some of the forums require your host to have SQL support (most often MySQL), while others can work without such database support.

You should also be aware that installing a Bulletin Board is not quite the same as installing a feedback form or a counter script. Forums / BBSes tend to take more work to set up correctly. Moreover, discussion forums consume huge amounts of resources, both in terms of processor time as well as disk space. You should also remember to back up your message base daily (if not more often) in order to minimize your losses should the server's hard disk crash or the like.

If you do not have the resources to spare, you might want to consider one of the free CGI hosting services for forums such as those listed on the Free Message Boards (Forums / BBS) Hosting page.