What technology does it take for a website to contain forums?

[Bubzeebub]

Is it easy to start up a website that's like a forum?

[edited by: tedster at 2:30 am (utc) on Jan. 2, 2005]

[BwanaZulia]

Yes, it is just not easy to build a good web community where people want to post to those forums, or if they do, to make money off of those forums. :)

BZ

[tedster]

It takes more than HTML to create a forum - some kind of server side processing is involved - and that scripting and file system is often part of the secret for running a good forum with good admin and editing tools.

So I've moved this thread from the Browsers Forum to the Website Technology forum in oder to catch some other ideas on what it takes, technically, to really have a good forum on a website.

(And for the community aspects of forum
building, we also have an entire forum [webmasterworld.com]
for the topic, which can be quite endless.)

[Jon_King]

Bubzeebub,

You asked about the technology, search for forum software. There are many very good free implementations for setting up a forum. If you can run ASP or PHP from your host/server, you can do it quite easily.

[Bubzeebub]

I asked because I noticed that most of the websites that rank high in the organiz searches are the forum/message board-type sites that have plenty of links. Thanks.