Creating a message board

No matter what you do, make sure you read the instructions for setting up discussion software to protect you and your community from the worst parts of the Internet: spam, spoofing, and abuse.

Make sure you immediately change the admin password from the one that came with the installation.

If you leave your communities wide open to all kinds of messaging, harvesting, and general misuse, you'll be wasting your days playing cue ball with thousands of idiots. Develop your acceptable use policy, configure your boards to support it, then implement it.

And if the software you're looking at doesn't support features like email checking, moderation, abuse reporting, anti-spam tools, and more, just keep looking.

Be prepared to take the time to manage your community so that it doesn't become just another of the millions of web forums where there are no reports of people distracting you from your site.

- is your site based on php / mysql or asp / sql? Chances are, if you don’t know where to even find tables, what you can’t do is what you want.

HOWEVER, if it's php / mysql, I recommend Cool PHP scripts . It covers setting up your community forum / message board.

As I said, you probably won't be doing this alone, at least not without a long, frustrating learning curve.

You can always post the assignment and someone will be more than willing to bid on it at elance or rentacoder or any other site of your choice.

Wikipedia has a large list of forum search engines . Choose the one that best suits the programming languages ​​you are familiar with, the features you want, etc.

I find Vanilla to be a much better phpBB forum app for aesthetic reasons as well as extensibility. I haven't seen / used it in a situation where a lot of sub-forums were required, so depending on your scope, this might not be the right choice, but for small to medium sized forums I suggest trying it first.