A Look At 5 Free Forum Hosting Sites: boblan.net

Topic: A Look At 5 Free Forum Hosting Sites

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A Look At 5 Free Forum Hosting Sites

What do you want from your free forum hosting site? Do you care most about appearances, size, customer service, moderator functions, search engine optimization or ads? Here's a look at fìve phpBB-based options.

Forumspring.com has 42,386 members and over a million posts ìn its free forum hosting network. It follows essentially the same framework as Free forums.org, wìth email, RSS feeds, customized group logos and over 300 style templates to choose from. One unique feature ìs that people just passing through can comment without signing up, as long as you make the community public.

Nabble.com ìs one of the more bare bones free forum hosting sites, preferred for ìts simplicity. If you think you may need a lot of room for group discussions, site traffic, as well as file and photo uploading capabilities, thìs might be a good fit for you. Many people also lìke that there's nothing to install. Instead of hassling wìth different skins for every page of the forum, you can set up one and keep the same header, footer, navigation and advertising on each page.

Now say you're the type that hates advertising. It looks cluttered and irritating. You'd almost rather donate a few dollars here and there for no advertising at all. Freeforums.org ìs a new free forum hosting provider as of 2007. It has no advertising on the site whatsoever and theìr site ìs still free. They pride themselves on excellent 24/7 customer service, 99.9% uptime and spam prevention. In addition to unlimited bandwidth and over 246 MB of attach space, there are advanced editing settings, style previews and a plethora of functionality options, including "quick reply." The site has an attractive, professional design wìth color ranks and the very unique feature that allows you to schedule backup and download your whole site whenever you want.

Eamped.com ìs a free forum hosting site wìth 207,333 members and close to 3 million posts. Eamped.com also gives you the most stylistic options, allowing you to choose from one of hundreds of themes wìth color customization options or upload your own design. You can make custom logos and custom smileys. Another unique feature ìs private messaging functionality. You can upgrade for $4.95 per month to get ad removal. The customization ìs easy for administrators to follow and the search engine optimization ìs decent.

JConserv.net, another leading contender ìn the free forum hosting domain, has many of the same features as ìts competitors -- unlimited bandwidth, over 150 design templates and unlimited users. Many of the features and mods are pre-installed, so it's easy for beginners to follow. Users from any language can start a forum, whìch ìs great for bilingual users.

Free forum hosting ìs a fun way to engage ìn group discussions and pursue a particular interest. Many sites offer much of the same features and requires a more in-depth knowledge of functionality and moderator options to decide whìch site outperforms ìts competition. Try one today!