Reason for Writing: I want to gather information for a friend who is a professional in the behavioral sciences.
Epistemic Status: Less than 2 hours googling how to build a forum, and a couple youtube videos
Requirements:
- Aesthetic
- Inexpensive
- Private
- Easily Setup
The goal is to create a small, private forum for discussions.
I've looked into discourse, not sure if that's the best option.
MyBB (or similar) with a custom theme.
Aesthetic: lots of themes available, and making your own seems easy.
Inexpensive: can’t beat “free” for the software, and cheap hosting that supports PHP+MySQL is plentiful.
Private: trivial to set up basically arbitrary access controls, as with any half-decent forum software.
Easily set up: standard PHP+MySQL stuff.
(I strongly anti-recommend Discourse as a forum platform.)
Indeed. And what you’ll generally find is that mature, widely-used platforms tend to have many and varied tools for dealing with this sort of thing, whereas if you build custom software, you end up having to handle many more edge cases, attack types, etc., than you’d expected (because it’s very hard to think of all such possibilities in advance), and the project just balloo... (read more)