Guide to Setting up Forums

[italiarule]

How to: Set up Alliance Forums

 

 

A forum is a vital part of an alliance. It is where the alliance lives and represents the public face that your alliance presents to the world. Therefore, it is very important that your forum look as good as it can. This guide has two sections. The first is to help you with forum structure and some general tips. The second section is how to get the forums started; the software and the hosting.

Section 1
I. General forum tips
II. Suggested structure

Section 2
III. Hosted forums
IV. Do it yourself
V. A Comparison of different forum software
VI. Hosting
1. Free Hosting
2. Paid hosting
VII. Setting it all up.
VIII. Contact/Questions



I. General Forum tips

There are some easy things that you can do on any forum software to make it look as good as possible. First, make sure you have spelled everything in the forum areas correctly and use proper English. To a visiting diplomat, improperly spelled forum names or government positions are not good signs. If you don't know how to spell "alliance," you probably aren't ready to be founding one. Second, make sure your forums look good. Use colors that look nice together and avoid clashing colors. Third, make sure all of your HTML tags work. Broken code makes you look like a newb. If you don't know how to do something, ask for help.

II. An example forum structure:

THE GATEWAY
- Member Application Area (open to all)
- Diplomat Sign In Area (open to all)

THE COMMONS
- Social Area (open to all--diplomats like to play too)
-- Subforum: Spam and Games (open to all--the place for counting games and the like)

INFORMATION DESK
- Announcements Center (open to all, post announcements/treaties here)

LEARNING CENTER
- Guides (open to members, post guides here)
- Academy (open to members, train new members here)

ALLIANCE FORUM (all forums in category open only to members)
- Assembly Hall (Member chat)
-Membership updates 
- Ministry of Defense
- Ministry of Domestic Affairs
- Ministry of Finance
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs
- Government Area
-- Subforum: Member questions area (members ask the government questions here)
-- Subforum: Government Chambers (public deliberation chamber for government, members can see but not post)
--- Subforum: Private Chambers (Visible only to government, private discussion here)

- EMBASSY ROW (embassies) (all forums here visible to members and ambassadors)

ARCHIVES (visible to members only)
- Open Archive (general archive)
- Closed Archive (government archive for classified documents)

That is the structure and layout of the forums. However you need to decide where they are hosted.
You have two choices: “Hosted forums†and “Do it yourselfâ€.

Section 2

III. Hosted forums

Hosted forums are complete packages. It is hosted on the servers of the company that is providing the service, so they take care of the maintenance. These are simple and quick to set up. However they become limiting very quickly. You do not want to be on this longer than you have to.

I would personally recommend Freeforums.org. They offer a good range of options on their free forums, and a friendly admin control panel.

IV. Do it yourself

Do it yourself means hosting the forums yourself. You have control over them in a much better way than on hosted forums. You can choose the forum software, customize the look and feel, and add in sections that are not otherwise available. The rest of this guide will help you with setting up this kind of forum.

1. A Comparison of different forum software

Paid:
Vbulletin:
Pros: Widely Used, Has a large community
Cons: Bloated, Not very friendly for people with subpar internet
Cost: $195 for the license

Invision Power Board (IPB):
Pros: Used by a lot of (That terrible game that is totally irrelevant and I shouldn't be bringing it up anyways) players, good community and support
Cons: Database and Bandwidth Hog, has vulnerabilities unless you update to the newest version as soon as it comes out
Cost: $175 for the boards. You get 6 months of support and updates. It costs $25 to access upgrades after that.

Free:
Simple Machines Forum (SMF):
Pros: Free, excellent community, Great Mod Making Community
Cons: The themes are lacking, but you can create your own. The support can take a little longer than the above boards, because volunteers do the support for SMF

PHP Bulletin Board (phpBB):
Pros: More advanced admin panel, Quicker Support than SMF because it has a larger support community
Cons: More Advanced Admin Panel, Mods are harder to install, Updates take longer to install, many security vulnerabilities.

Summary: Use IPB or SMF. Those are my recommendations. However, you should research which forum system would suit YOU best.

Once you have decided which software best suits you, you have to decide where to host it. You will need a place to put all of these files.

VI. Hosting

1. Free Hosting

Free hosting is the cheapest (obviously) option, yet it can also be the most dangerous one. When picking a free host, you need to choose one that has been around for a while. It also needs to have a decent reputation. Why does it need to have a good reputation? Because a lot of hosts with deals that look amazing not going to last very long at all. You want a place with a great reputation. You will also need a place that supports PHP and MySQL (at least one database). With Free Hosting, you will probably have to put a small ad or a link back to the hosts site in order to have a site with them.. You can look up reviews for Free Web Hosts here and here. You do not want to pick a bad one, so research is your friend.

2. Paid Hosting

Paid Hosting. You put your own money into it and you can get some nice results. However, this is as dangerous as free hosting in some regards. Instead of little kids out for a quick buck, there are adults out to scam people. This is known as Overselling. It means that they promise everyone a deal like 100 GB Disk Space and 1 Terabyte of Bandwidth (Transfer) a month. No server can realistically support such a demand. In reality, they have an invisible cap (usually set at 10% of what they actually promise you). Now for Paid Hosting, you need to figure out what is the best for your price, while not overselling.

Examples of good webhosts:
ApisNetworks
Charlottez Web

The Golden Rule of picking out a paid webhost is: If it looks too good to be true, it is probably an overseller. Also get a webhost that uses cPanel


VII. Setting it all up.

You have chosen your software. You have selected your webhost. Now you need to install your forum system. You have two options. You can use Fantastico, in which you click and it fully installs a board one version behind (I don't recommend, especially for SMF, it leaves about 30 MB of useless files on your server). Or you can go to the site of the forum system, download the newest version, and upload everything to the site via FTP (File Transfer Protocol). It will take longer, but your forum will be a happier one in the end.

VIII. Contact/Questions

Bought to you by italia

I do hope that this helps people who are trying to set up their alliance. If you have any questions please PM me or find me on  IRC (Nick: italia)

Many thanks to bros for letting me use portions of his guide from another world 

[Geronimo]

Thanks for the information. It would helps someone who's going to create a new alliance.

[Dwynn]

Good addition italia, glad to see this dusted off and brought from the other world.

[Xenodolf]

Awesome..

[Alataq]

Good information.

[Kurdanak]

I love public guides like this.