IAC DISCUSSION FORUMS

Our movie club has a new webmaster who is revamping the site and we would like to include our own forum just for members and selected guests.

My knowledge of how to set up and manage a forum is non-existant as is our webmaster's

How do we do this?

I would sugest that you're making a rod for your own back with that idea.

With our new website at http://www.OVFM.org, we have the capability to easily have a forum, but we decided against it for a couple of reasons.

If you look at the members compared to traffic here, it's pretty dead as it is, but imagine how it would be with 5-10 *active* members of a club. it would be regularly dead, and people would soon lose interest after the initial excitement died down.

There is maintenance to consider with a forum too and we didn't fancy that, considering with about 70 club members, we'd have maybe 1 or 2 at best, posts a week, and the majority of those would go unanswered, so why bother when there would likely be so little activity.

Forums work when people visit them daily and see new content. For this to happen organically, you generally need members in the hundreds.

When people ask us about a forum, because they have romantic notions we advise them to come here, where the infrastructure and maintenance is already taken care of.

If we ever decide to take the plunge and have our own private forum, then my first point of call would be the IAC forum-master, to see if we may be able to have a private area that is visible and accessible to our members only. That way, non members wouldn't even know that it existed!


I would say that we haven't discussed it or even mentioned it with anyone, but assuming that this is running phpbb 2 or 3, it should be theoretically possible..

Firstly, I must say I agree with Chris - to a large extent.

We have one and it is rarely used for precisely the reasons Chris has stated: basically better forums already exist. I'm a frequent poster and a mod on another forum which almost perfectly matches my own needs. The club forum is (almost) superfluous. Why would I ask questions on a forum of people I meet every week? I'm pretty familiar with their knowledge areas and if I have a more pressing question, I'll email them or pick up the phone.

And having started to post here, I find it a useful place to deal with matters which are maybe a bit more IAC- and club-centric.

However ...
There are one or two benefits to a club forum.

Club competitions: Our members each award points for each film in internal competitions and score are accumulated on the night, but here is also space to make comments about each film. The forum provides a place where we can copy out all those comments (anonymously) thus giving the maker a bit more insight into what people liked/didn't like about their film and also prompting further discussion.

It provides a very useful place for people to link to articles on other websites (without having to do it "formally" through the webmaster).

It's a useful place for people to continue discussions which are perhaps only of interest or relevance to a small part f the membership.

I disagree with Chris about maintenance. It takes nothing. I set one up myself a few years back simply as a means of communication between a number members who were working on a "secret" film - secret in that we were in direct competition with two other groups of members. It took absolutely no skill from me, was not hosted by our ISP and was entirely free. And it used phpbb - the same as this.

I agree with Chris. How many clubs have a forum which is busy? If I have a problem I usually phone up the club expert and usuall get the correct Guidance. If not I go on the net forums which are devoted solely to the subject I am in need of help of.

Guys

Thanks for the postings BUT the question was HOW WE DO IT and not why we should not.

I agree that the traffic will probably not be worth the effort but that is up to our webmaster

I guess none of us really understood your question.

At the risk of stating the obvious, go to this website, http://www.phpbb.com/ download the software, install it on your website and hey presto. It's really quite easy, it does it all for you...

Is that what you meant?

Hope this helps...

....or, if you don't host your own website, see if your ISP already provides phpbb.

Or go to one of the many free sites (eg http://www.freeforums.org/) and simply create one there. That's what I did for our "Studio Group" forum. The benefit of this approach is you don;t have to get involved with the management at all (other than user management and deciding on the sub-forums). The disadvantage is they are often funded by adverts and there's no real comeback if the host decides to withdraw its service. (Having said that, is there really any comeback if a paid fo host doesn't provide all it should?)

I have been watching this thread with interest.

Though I agree that the forum is probably not a useful idea on a club website Tim indicates a couple of ways to go. Setting up PHPBB is not very easy for a novice webmaster so I would hesitate to encourage that.

First things first: check whether or not the software s/he is using to write the site has a forum option built-in. Some do. Even the Weebly system I used in the IAC website tutorials on building a website for nothing incorporates one.

The underlying issue is that while standard web pages are often stored as separate "pages" which the user can "leaf through", a forum has to have a database behind it to accept the input from members and display it in the required ways. That database has to live on the servers (computers) of the web hosting company.

As Tim points out there are stand-alone forums you can use. What happens is that behind-the-scenes they are hosted somewhere else and not on your web hosting company's machines. Weebly uses the forum from http://tal.ki which you can get direct from their website. The free version might be fine for a club's use.

I suggest also looking at http://vanillaforums.org

Yet another approach is to look at building the whole website on the basis of a social networking website. Look at http://www.socialgo.com for information - their free option lets you experiment. The only video club I know using it is Bourne End. To see all the features you would need to ask to be allowed to join temporarily. They are a friendly bunch and might well be willing to help a fellow webmaster/mistress in that way.

Dave

Cracking Guys, just what I am after (I Think)