I fell into forum admin by accident last year when the owner of a forum I was a member of asked for some help installing mods and I ended up staying on as a tech support admin looking after most of the back end. That forum imploded a couple of months ago but a new one was set up by one of the members in a effort to keep in touch with everyone...so I offered my services again and am now co-running the site with them. Sucker for punishment me ATM we're on a free hosted forum site which is doing ok for us so far....but eventually I think we'd like our own little home on a paid host to allow for more customisation so I'm starting to look into our options...and hence why I'm looking around here. Looking forward to chatting and getting lots of tips and ideas from you all
If I suddenly win the lottery I might consider vB but otherwise it's the free options We're currently using phpbb2 and so far I'm thinking about either phpbb3 or SMF if/when we decide to move. I'm more familiar with SMF so am leaning that way as I'm more comfortable delving into the code...but I'm hesitant to change unnecessarily as our members have been mucked about so much in the past by and I don't want to scare any of them off . I have a fleeting glance at upgrading to phpbb3 on our free host every week or so, have a look around my offline test site and then change my mind knowing my co-admin (who in their own words is not very technical) would run away screaming from it as the backend is, in my opinion, so awful....
Hi Ca55ie, Welcome! If you have the test site on localhost. You can install them and do side by side with importing and stuff. That's what I did on my phpbb install. If you have a flexible theme installed sometimes you can convert anmost won't notice if you switch and set up things on an identicle basis. Hope you enjoy it here.