[Coach]

I'm adding a feature to one of my sites where people can sign up for their own site and have it hosted by us as follows:

http://www.mysite.com/teams/theirpagehere

Upon signing up I am giving them a variety of tools, one of which is a message board. Are there any message boards that are free and also look good without needing a database backend? I ask because I doubt these boards would receive serious traffic where they would need vBulletin or Insivision and if the setup is automated a simply, professional looking board might be fine. I have a souped up version of Matt Wright's old WWWBoard but I'm looking for a linear look ala vBulletin, etc.

[darkcarnival]

well unforionly no the only way you can get a really nice forum like this is by having a database. if you want i know some very good 1s worth trying:

XMB(xmbforum.com)-is what i use and is very good
PHPBB(phpbb.com)-is nice thouh a little hard to install
YaBB(yabbse.org)god but had problems
invasion board-good though i dont know link.

actually i just though of something YaBB has a perl verion of SE which is really good. i used it b4 i installed mysql. the link is http://www.yabbforum.com its i think is the best forum that doesnt need a DB.hope this helped

[digioz]

There are plenty of text based PHP message boards that you can download for free and use, which look good. The only problem with them is that they are not very secure (easy to bring them down).

If you still want to give them a shot go to hotscripts.com and do a search under text based PHP message boards.

[mdhall]

www.hotscripts.com has a lot of PHP based message boards, many are free and use flatfile ( text ) databases instead of mysql.

[ZDF]

In my opinion ,IPB may be the best board of free. but it's need mysql.

[Coach]

Originally Posted by digioz

There are plenty of text based PHP message boards that you can download for free and use, which look good. The only problem with them is that they are not very secure (easy to bring them down).

If you still want to give them a shot go to hotscripts.com and do a search under text based PHP message boards.

When you say easy to bring down, what should I look for to prevent this? Any advice to make sure and avoid problems like this?