Tech Considerations for Forum Hosting

[TooManyWheels]

I do independent consulting work that focuses on facilitating groups in decision making and collaboration. I have an opportunity to submit a proposal to a government agency looking to interact with communities in various ways, specifically including an online forum.

My impression is that it is relatively easy to get forum software hosted and running, but I have no idea what needs to be taken into account beyond that from a technical perspective. Obviously someone has to set up ID and passwords, but what about spam and data protection? What are the other considerations on the back end from a government-tied “best practices” perspective? Can this all handled by a hosting company by buying the right plan, or should I consider hiring a technical person?

All my tech system experience is in the functional design of ERP systems, so this is a new frontier. Help!

 

[widman]

I gave up hosting a forum. So much spam it became an hour or so twice a day. Blacklisted countries, words, etc. People love to post sexual links.

No real technical knowledge required, just time and patience.

 

[uc50ic4more]

I administer a few forums for clients (on my own server), and use Simple Machines Forums. There are a few other F/LOSS forums packages out there, too (phpBB comes to mind); all of which provide functions for all of your needs.

There are some providers who have these forums installable on their hosting packages via there controls panels, and still others who host free (or paid) forums for you.

If you go the route I take, you're in charge of all of the forum as well as the server itself. Using a pre-built, pre-configured installation provided by a hosting provider may be the best compromise between having control over the software but not needing to run the hardware or the underlying OS; and the installation *should* be portable to other providers (you'd only need to reconfigure the forum software's database connection and a few other things) unless the provider had made some strange changes to their configurations. The free ones are usually fraught with ads and are light on features and performance.

Most F/LOSS forums packages use the MySQL or Postgres databases, and you'll need a server that can handle some database loads. (This is why I like to use my own server: Many cheap, "shared" hosting has terrible database performance. Using a VPS or modest dedicated server might be the best route, and they're not prohibitively expensive) Installing some good caching software can lighten that quite a bit, though.

The best ways to mitigate against spam are by making the permissions of the forum such that registrations have to be approved, and guests are unable to post replies or start threads. That, coupled with some good CAPTCHA's or questions designed to root out robots (eg. "Is fire hot?") keep the machines away to begin with.

 

[Familyguy]

I've gotten roped into recommending and setting up forum and "community" sites a few times over the last couple of years. In each case, drupal, floated to the top after a number of other alternatives were sussed out and test driven. I'm helping to spec/setup such a system now for a company that gets 20+ million page views per day. A number of big media companies are using it these days too. And it's FREE.

www.drupal.org

Best,

 

[uc50ic4more]

Drupal is an *awesome* (and F/LOSS) CMS (Content Managment System) and features a forum built into it as well as a few nice add-on forums. It might be noted, though, that being a forum is not Drupal's raison d'etre and administration may be unclear or inefficient if all you want to do is run a forum.

 

[TooManyWheels]

Your information is being very useful, and appreciated!

 

[TooManyWheels]

Is there a need to defend against deliberate attempts to hack the forum and data? There won't be any need to restrict visual access to the forum content, it will all be public, but it will be of utmost importance that it remain as entered.

 

[Familyguy]

Originally Posted By: TooManyWheels
Is there a need to defend against deliberate attempts to hack the forum and data? There won't be any need to restrict visual access to the forum content, it will all be public, but it will be of utmost importance that it remain as entered.


Sadly, there is a determined group of knuckleheads out there that seem to get off on defacing public-facing forums and websites. You'll need to stay on top of security patches and likely limit anonymous posting. Then there's things like using "captcha" to add a nuisance barrier to automated bot attacks.

Good luck. There's also forum hosting ISPs out there that will basically just deliver you a blank forum that you can populate for some cheap flat rate per month. I don't have any experience with those, but there's a number of them out there. Perhaps they might help the OP out with security and whatnot. I've got a background in developing sites so I prefer to just use drupal and do it myself.

Best,

 

[TooManyWheels]

Thanks again!