From Barbelith

Maybe you think Barbelith is full of Facist Nazi Lizard Cliques who are oppressing your freedom of speech. Maybe you think Barbelith is a fantastic place and you want to make one too. This is a quick guide to building your own discussion board on the net.

Entirely Free Options

The following will cost you absolutely no money to set up, and are very straightforward to get started with, so are good if you're not that techy or you want to set things up in a hurry. Visitors will, however, be bombarded with banners, popups and possibly spam. (It may be advisable to use a "junk" email address to sign on to these services.)

• Delphi forums (http://www.delphiforums.com/) - also has a webchat system, but people seem to think being impaled on a turnip would be more fun
• ezboard (http://www.ezboard.com/)
• MSN groups (http://groups.msn.com/) - gives you a bulletin board as well as space for members to upload photos and other files.
• Yahoo groups (http://groups.yahoo.com/) - more like a threaded mailing list than a discussion board, but you get a lot of space for people to store files, as well as good control over moderators and permissions.
• Livejournal (http://www.livejournal.com/) allows you to set up community forums with a sophisticated threaded comment system. There are no banners, popups or spam. However, users will either have to be Livejournal members or remain anonymous, identifying themselves through their posts. Livejournal membership is now unrestricted.
• Blogger (http://www.blogger.com) will also allow more than one person with a (free) blogger.com account to contribute to a particular site, and needs no codes, although there are issues with reliability, and there's no comment feature. No popups or spam, and banners are small. (gentlething entity: Blogger recently added a comment feature and removed banners.)

Things That Require You To Pay Money

For professional-looking, customisable, ad-free boards you will have to open your wallet.

• Hosting - you will need to have webspace that supports PHP, Perl or whatever technology the board software uses. This will cost money. There are many companies that offer hosting services here is an unrepresentative selection:
  • 1 and 1 (http://oneandone.co.uk/)

• Board software - you will need to install software on your site to run the board. This is usually fairly easy but not for an absolute beginner. Have a geek to hand just in case. The following is an incomplete list of the software available for free:
  • YaBB (http://www.yabbforum.com/)
  • CuteCast (http://www.artscore.net/cutecast/)
  • IkonBoard (http://www.ikonboard.com/) - fridgemagnet has installed this himself and thinks it's pretty decent

• Collaborative sites or blogs - you might wish to build a community or site around some other paradigm than the bulletin board. One popular model is the news/blog site. Software for this includes:
  • Slashcode (http://slashcode.com/), used by Slashdot (http://slashdot.org)
  • Scoop (http://scoop.kuro5hin.org/), used by kuro5hin.org (http://www.kuro5hin.org)
  • Blogging packages like Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org) allow multiple authors to contribute.

• Homegrown software - having your own personal system gives you the ultimate in customisability, but you will need a programmer to write it, and a lot of work is involved. Barbelith is a homegrown system. The best method is to learn PHP, Perl, ASP, JSP or some other scripting technology.