(September 28, 2018 at 6:19 pm)AFTT47 Wrote:(September 28, 2018 at 2:46 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: How are you being sucked in? All I've seen is whinging about something you're not even partaking in.
I'm being sucked in because the way things are going, there won't be any conventional message boards left.
I'm a member of a few Reddit forums because there is no conventional alternative. People aren't making them anymore.
So message forums cost money. How did all those message forums survive before the scourge of social media came upon us? They all managed. I would gladly contribute $100.00 a year to one of my Reddit groups if they would replace it with a proper forum.
The internet has moved on, in terms of the kind of hosting to use (don't really want ads injected into every page, right? Because that's what free hosts and even some shared hosts do), security (free hosting is notoriously unsafe... shared hosting is either locked down (no shell access) or, again, unsafe), speed, etc.
If you want a decent forum, you need, at the minimum:
1. A decent VPS (virtual private server... Linode, DigitalOcean, etc.) account with enough RAM to handle all the requests in a snappy manner.
2. Security. A lot of it is free, but needs to be configured properly. Everything from the firewall, to SSL certificates, to monitoring/jailing like Fail2ban, etc.
3. Backups. If your system is borked, or if it gets compromised, you'll need to be able to restore.
It's not the late 90's/early 00's any longer. The cost of running a forum has grown with both the ubiquity of always connected devices and the ever present threat of script kiddies, bots, etc. No one can get a free hosting account, load up some off-the-shelf PHP forum software, and call it a day any longer. It's not the same world, and the time/costs associated with doing it right reflect that.
"I was thirsty for everything, but blood wasn't my style" - Live, "Voodoo Lady"