starting a FORUM website

[soimcrazy]

I'm trying to figure out the best and easiest way to host a website for a group of 200 employees. It will be a forum type website for everyone to express issues at work.

I have no experience in web design. Whats my best bet?

 

[ian]

vbulletin.com is a good option, it costs around US$160 to buy plus US$30 a year for updates.
phpbb.com is a free option, but I would not consider using that for a free site.
Things to consider, will it be hosted on a work intranet or on the internet.
If it is on the internet, the forums can be setup as private so that they cannot be viewed by the public. You can also limit the registrations.

 

[zkiller]

do you want this forum to be publicly accessible or just within the local intranet at work? if it is the later, i would suggest setting up IIS on one of the machines in the office, prefferably a server, but any machine running win2k or winxp pro will work just fine. then i would give snitz forums a try. probably the most popular asp based forum software that is available today. it's distributed under a GPL liscense, thus making it open source and very much "free"!

if you need help setting up IIS, try this link and follow the instructions.

http://www.webdesignforum.com/showthread.php?t=18

 

[[tab]]

You could also set up a NNTP news server...

 

[zkiller]

You could also set up a NNTP news server...

good thinking!