Need help in creating Forum for invites only...

Vagabond

Vagabond

Adept
Hello All,

Need help in creating a forum.

Background - We work in one of well known material handling automobiles and have design support in India. We are having knowledge sharing sessions but lack the caliber to take the design modifications, cost optimization to next level. We have been thinking to start a technical discussion forum internally to optimize the individual knowledge and share across forum. We tried with existing "Share Point" but the it needs IT approval from IT dept and is going nowhere since last year or so....

So looking for free forum for limited people.

Requirements -

1. Should be open to invite only.
2. Should get RSS feeds in outlook for new threads, post etc.
2. Site should have minimum advertisements etc.
3. User friendly (for mechanical engineers to handle registrations, posting rights, permissions etc.)
4. Able to upload pics, excel sheets, ppt`s, video (rarely) or video links etc. Upload capability of design related files (.dwg, .prt, .asm) would be added advantage
5. Should be legal (don`t know if it violates any orgnasational laws etc)

Will Add my doubts as I go on building it...

TIA

tagging - @Renegade @seshu @vivek.krishnan
 
^ Yes.
1 MyBB & Vanilla forums can be used for invitees only and maintenance is easy for the both.
2 RSS feeds are available in both systems.
however mailing regular feed to members can be a problem with the free web hosts
3 number of advertisements depends on the free web hosts' policy
4 pictures can be uploaded and documents can be embeded in both the systems
5 MyBB and Vanilla are open source
 
if you are interested in 100 % free community programs then MyBB suits your requirements. As i did integrated my bb into one of my forums.
 
ch@ts said:
You can try hosting on Openshift.
Click to expand...
Recently I had to install MyBB on Openshift and everything went smooth. I highly recommended it for devs. However if you are a programmming noob and just want a forum up and running, this may not be good solution
 
Vagabond said:
^total noob
Click to expand...
I was total noob when I had started my forum and it turned out surprisingly well ;-)

If you don't mind paying, go with any hosting solution which provides cPanel and Softaculous. With just two simple next, next click you will have your forum up and running.

If not, then I would suggest you to go with Go Free Serve. Pretty good free hosting service, though I haven't used them lately. Then you have to manually create a database, upload forum files and do installation. 000 web host is another free alternative. If you need help, drop me a PM and give me access. I shall do that installation for you.
 
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