Discussion forum?

miceormen

miceormen

miceormen

Associate
Joined
26 Feb 2008
Posts
437
Hey all

I'm currently at University, but low and behold there isn't a forum for discussing those issues that really can't be explored in a Union council/debating hall or on the dreaded facebook without endless spam and topic deviation - not that these are bad things, i just want something a little more effective.

As no doubt 95% of you will agree, forums are absolutely brilliant for discussing anything, be it hardware :D or life in general (figured this was the best place to post this). I want to put together a forum for my university to allow students to discuss everything from the academic calender to deadlines to staff to social events to communities, hopefully finding help and answers to questions gone unanswered by our 'tutors'. Unfortunately I have no experience with website creation, hosting, servers et al.

Help would be appreciated because this really needs doing.

miceormen :)
 
palmy said:
When a went to uni a few years ago there were plenty of forums. I've just googled and found what appears to be a popular forum and it's name rings a bell as well.

http://www.thestudentroom.co.uk/

Throw your idea in the bin and go to the pub :)
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Well aren't you just delightful.

The student room is typically used by freshers and university applicants. This would be for current students.

There aren't 'plenty of forums' nowadays because the majority of people rely upon facebook - which is useful if you want to declare you're a fan of noel edmonds or oxygen or swine flu - but useless if you actually want to discuss things in a set area.
 
If you aren't sure what you're doing with a website, then you might be better off getting a free hosted forum. There is a lot of places which will do this, eg

http://www.invisionplus.net/
http://www.forumer.com/
http://www.proboards.com/

etc

Downside of those is that as they are free, there will be adverts. But on the other hand, it's all installed and set up for you already.

If you don't want adverts or want to customise it further and possibly integrate it further in to a website, then you are really looking at getting your own hosting for that. There's a summary of paid hosts made by someone on this forum, you can see it here. With paid hosting, many hosts will have a control panel which allow 1 click installs of common scripts for forums and blogs etc. If you choose one that doesn't, then you'd need something like phpBB and would have to download it, extract it and upload through ftp, then set it up yourself.

I personally use Vidahost, whose allow installation of phpBB and SMF through the control panel.

I'm not sure how much space/bandwidth a typical forum uses so can't really advise how much space you should look at if you consider going down the paid hosting route. You'll also need to make sure they support MySQL and php, although most linux based solutions support it.
 
phpBB usually issues updates for security leaks on a regular basis.

I have installed BB using Cpanel and whilst it's easy it does need to be maintained by using a terminal to open and run the updates they usually come zipped and you need to be able to extract them into the phpBB folder and then run the update (perhaps now they can be run from the BB itself (been a while)

Just saying don't expect your Cpanel BB to be fully security patched...

EDIT: Just checked my Cpanel and it does indeed have the latest version :D



My simple gaming forum gets 45-50 attempted hacks per week because I use LDU and their was (18 months) ago a security flaw. It was patched but hackers try and try again to use it. :(

Perhaps your site could get lost in the phpBB masses :D
 
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miceormen said:
Well aren't you just delightful.

The student room is typically used by freshers and university applicants. This would be for current students.

There aren't 'plenty of forums' nowadays because the majority of people rely upon facebook - which is useful if you want to declare you're a fan of noel edmonds or oxygen or swine flu - but useless if you actually want to discuss things in a set area.
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TSR has lots of students, applicants and freshers. I go there also (non student)

They have heated discussions about everything under the sun there lol.

As above try using phpBB or invisionfree.
 
I really don't think it would get used. My university has forums for the academic side and the SU made their own forums too. They hardly ever get used as everything is done on Facebook.

Here's a good example, for one of my modules the tutor made a discussion forum and stressed highly that we should contribute to it. Throughout the whole year no one made a single post. However, a Facebook group was set up by students to discuss the module and that was used.

From what I've found if people want to discuss a certain issue at university (Academic or Social) they'll generally find a way. This was is almost always facebook.
 
Thanks for all the posts so far. I agree that usage might wane, but most of the people i've spoken to so far think it could be useful, so using invision boards or something similar would probably be the way to go. I agree that student room discusses a lot of things other than just applications - but they don't appear to be University specific.

If it takes off, upgrading to my own forum running phpBB etc will probably be the way to go, especially if the security updates are that frequent - no doubt some disgruntled / bored computer science student will have a go.

Thankyou for being noob friendly ^_^
 
miceormen said:
Thanks for all the posts so far. I agree that usage might wane, but most of the people i've spoken to so far think it could be useful, so using invision boards or something similar would probably be the way to go. I agree that student room discusses a lot of things other than just applications - but they don't appear to be University specific.

If it takes off, upgrading to my own forum running phpBB etc will probably be the way to go, especially if the security updates are that frequent - no doubt some disgruntled / bored computer science student will have a go.

Thankyou for being noob friendly ^_^
Click to expand...

Oh, they do have university areas to chat about. I think its further down the page. lol I never use them. But if anyone has questions they are free to ask at TSR.

Good luck!
 
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