Any good forums on free forum sites?

Generally the forums I've seen hosted on those free forum hosts have been pretty bad... the templates are usually ugly, they have ads or spam all over the place, the URLs are long, etc. But are there any good ones out there, where the community is strong enough to have overcome these issues?

 

'~' I have free forums!!!

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Pisoga Is a successful free forum IMO.

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I meant free forum hosts such as ZetaBoards and others

 

Oh, PSH! THOSE are MORE than ugly!!!

 

I have a friend that says it is ok for his little hobby but I have no link. It is on something called "forumer".

He recommended using that instead of starting my own forum. I am REALLY glad I started from scratch with my own url.

 

While I'm not a fan of free forum hosting services, I have indeed heard some excellent feedback about Forumer - and I'm also quite fond of their support forums.

 

My Playstation Revamped forum (see sig) is hosted on proboards, but it looks nothing like proboards

 

I have too say that forum IS quite nice.

 

I'll admit it: that is one of the nicest freely-hosted discussion boards that I have seen. Nice job

 

Big boards.com allows you to search by software, maybe have a quick nose at what they have

 

When I first started my forum, I thought that some of my competition on those free sites were big. But I learned better later on.

I can not say "no" - that is impossible for a free forum not to become big. But I think its less likely that a forum will be able to do so.

To me, its funny how forumer uses vbulletin for their support forum, but uses smf and ipb for the free stuff. If the free forum software was "really" as good as VB, then why not use it.

 

The worst free forum I ever saw had this yellow background with huge purple polkadots. It was hideous. Only three posts! (Probably the owner, his best friend, and his mother.)

 

Rofl!!! The worst free forum in my opinion is Dbz Zone Forum

 

Because they would need to buy many copies?

 

Thanks @ chris and babe.

I've seen worse that dbz one...if I come across any I'll post.

 

The only one that I know of (that is successful and I have ever invested any time in) is this one: Parrotlets, The Miniature Parrot..
It's not pretty, but it's active and just as good (as far as the community and resourceful aspect) as any other ones I visit.

That's about it though. Usually they are ugly, spammed, and the owner doesn't put much effort in. Afterall, what do you expect? If they aren't willing to buy a $9 domain and $5/month hosting, then I doubt they are willing to invest any significant amount of time and effort into the site.

 

Free Forums for you

That is the free forum host I used to use. I think one forum almost has 1,000,000 posts.

 

Why do they all use phpBB and not MyBB? Is it a licensing ordeal or something?

 

Do you mean in general? There are free MyBB hosts (CreateMyBB - Free and Easy MyBB Forum Hosting). Just like self-hosted free scripts, phpBB seems to be a lot more popular than MyBB for whatever reason.

 

I would never use a free forum service again.