Private Forums

[Serpentine]

I've been trying to explain to my mum the concept of internet forums, and at the same time I'm watching her try to organise a family get-together this weekend with mass emails flying all over the place, and I've started sort of fitting them together. I'm thinking of floating the idea of a family forum, a little private site, like the Playground but just for members of our family where we can organise things or share what we've been doing or just talking about stuff.
So, has anyone ever had any experience with this? Do they work? How much technical know-how do they require? I've found one place that apparently provides free ones, FreeForums.org (http://www.freeforums.org). Does anyone have any experience with that company, is it any good, or are there better ones around?
It may not happen; maybe no one else will be interested or maybe it'll just be too much effort. Just thought I'd look into it a bit before we mention it to the family as a whole.

[SiuiS]

I've got a Free invisionfree forum that's become a sort of archive or all my old D&D notes, that was a failed attempt at PbP with slackers. The forum itself was pretty easy to work with, but it gets tougher the more you want to customize. Colors is a synch, images, fades and feathering an all, not so much.

But easily functional, if you plan out the layout in advance.

[ThiagoMartell]

Isn't a facebook group easier?

[Serpentine]

Probably. Chances are that's what we'll end up doing. Curious to see if it'd work, though.
Out of curiosity, I made myself one at that site I linked to. I appear to have borked it already...

[Totally Guy]

My brother started a facebook group for the family to deal with my mum's partner Paul's death.

It's a bit premature seeing as he's nowhere near dead, he's the same as he's always been. He's not even unhealthy unless you consider smoking, drinking and eating curry to be terminal.

[GrlumpTheElder]

I've got a Free invisionfree forum that's become a sort of archive or all my old D&D notes, that was a failed attempt at PbP with slackers. The forum itself was pretty easy to work with, but it gets tougher the more you want to customize. Colors is a synch, images, fades and feathering an all, not so much.

But easily functional, if you plan out the layout in advance.

I agree. I‘m on invisionfree with a private forum, and think it‘s brilliant.

One I would warn you away from is Lefora. Personally I don‘t like the layout, you can only edit your posts up to 20 minutes after posting, and the forum is deleted after a month of innactivity...

[Kelb_Panthera]

My brother started a facebook group for the family to deal with my mum's partner Paul's death.

It's a bit premature seeing as he's nowhere near dead, he's the same as he's always been. He's not even unhealthy unless you consider smoking, drinking and eating curry to be terminal.

That's a bit morbid.

Is your brother looking foward to this fellow's death?

[Tyndmyr]

If you've got a bit of space on a server, hosting your own forums is remarkably easy, I've done it before. Free forum places generally make back hosting costs with ads. All depends what you'd rather deal with.

[Thes Hunter]

My Illyriad alliance uses free forums.

I don't see any advertising on the pages, which is cool. I don't know if the leadership upgraded to a VIP members or not. But I think they are very functional.

Seems like they can control the appearance pretty well. They function just like these, and even have the ability to moderate access.

So I think they would likely work as a solution to your family forum.

[Rawhide]

Be forewarned that most of these forums won't allow you to download your database to jump ship, locking you in to their services unless you start afresh.

[Anxe]

A local gaming group I was part of did it once. It didn't work so well for them. I'm betting it'll work even worse for a family that isn't net-savvy.

[Totally Guy]

That's a bit morbid.

Is your brother looking foward to this fellow's death?

Dreading it. My brother wrote to me one day saying we should be conscious that he won't be around forever... It upset me.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Dreading it. My brother wrote to me one day saying we should be conscious that he won't be around forever... It upset me.

Staring mortality in the face is, indeed, uncomfortable. /understatement

I suppose it'll be better to be prepared when it does happen, though that's not really something you can actually be entirely prepared for.

May Paul and your mum be happy together for a long time to come. :smallsmile:

[dps]

A local gaming group I was part of did it once. It didn't work so well for them. I'm betting it'll work even worse for a family that isn't net-savvy.

I don't know about facebook groups, or the behind-the-scenes details (the stuff the admins and owners deal with) of any forum, but FWIW, just as a member, Yahoo!groups can be a pain to deal with, more than any private forum I've dealt with.

[Neftren]

Depending on how tech-savvy you are, you can load up an Amazon Micro machine instance (free for the first year). They're basically virtual private servers running on Amazon's cloud architecture. You probably won't need all the fancy bells and whistles, but the important part is that you can get a server for free (for a year!). Plus the rates are cheap if you want to keep it up after a year.

Now, once you've got your virtual server in hand, you can load up any forum software of choice: SMF, PHPBB3, Vanilla, vBulletin -- for $$$, and so on. If you don't want to muddle around too much with it, you can just use Bitnami prepackaged AMIs, which will take care of most of the setup work for you.


The whole process from start to finish isn't actually all the painful come to think of it, but I spend a ton of time in a command line interface so... :smalleek:

[Dsurion]

I've used Invisionfree for private forums before, it worked pretty well for me. There were maybe 5-6 of us, and I was really the only tech-savvy person there. You don't have to get fancy with layout or anything, and it's pretty user-friendly. There's also lots of documentation and people willing to help on their primary forums as well.