Message board/ forum

I want to make a one-on-one message board nothing public

[avenir]

Hello everyone,

I am a fairly new SEO. Now, I have a client that wants to have a message board where he would only reply to the queries of his fans one-on-one, nothing like an open discussion type of message board/forum.

I went through the “Forum Community Building” and it is obvious that the most popular applications are “phpBB” and “invision”. Are those applications the right thing to do what I am looking for? And when you say download the application and install it, do you mean on the page of the site that the message board will be; in the sense that I download it on my desktop where I would install it on the message board page of the site and once this is done through FTP I would upload the page on the server where the site is hosted?

Also, on a post it was said that one could ask the people at the server where the site is hosted to install that feature, that is, message board feature for the site; if it is a feature that’s available on their server. Would this option be as good as the two applications mentioned above?

Please, could someone help me with that? If my solution resides in those options and if not: could you suggestion an alternative.

Thank you for your time.

avenir

[avenir]

Sorry, I want to correct my initial post. The client wants an open public message board. I realised that if it was not an open public message board, what I would have needed is a mail box an I already put one up.

avenir

[rogerd]

vBulletin is a commercial program that is quite powerful, too.

If I'm understanding what you want, you'd like a message board where people could post messages, but only the site owner could reply. While I haven't seen a forum configured in exactly this way, it would be fairly simple for a competent programmer to create a hack for this.

A few other thoughts:

1) I'd definitely require posts to be moderated, i.e., viewed by the owner or a moderator before being visible. Otherwise, there might be a lot of posts hanging out there that would end up being deleted as redundant, dumb, etc.

2) Something else to consider is having a portion of the forum open for public posting like a regular forum - this could help build community at the site. Of course, this would entail more moderation, etc.

3) As a totally different idea, you could just get fans to send emails with questions - the best ones could be selected and the Q/As posted using blog software.

[eggy ricardo]

"message board where people could post messages, but only the site owner could reply."

AFAIK, PHPbb has this as an option in the ACP, where you can select permissions for varying users/groups.

EDIT:: With regards to installing PHPbb, there are very good instructions on the site. Generally it involves downloading a zip from PHPbb.com, then unzipping that, uploading the files, setting a few permissions, and then loading the uploaded installer file. It is pretty simple if you have OK knowledge of FTP-ing and permission setting.

Hope this helps

[avenir]

Thank you rogerd and eggy ricardo for this information it shows me the direction to get started. I'll keep you posted with my progress.

I have a lot of respect for you guys, for I read this forum a lot and it's amazing the information one can find and how knowledgeable many of you are.

[AAnnAArchy]

I have that feature on my board (Threads) -- one forum which allows users to ask questions (read/no reply) and only one person has the ability to (read/reply) answer.