Any good forums on free forum sites?

Check out this one : TeaLeaf Graphics hosted on Forumotion

 

After having used Invisionfree back in 2006, I'd say I'd agree with the members that say they'd never use free forum hosting again. Okay, there were some decent forums I visited on free hosting (but most of them shut down or moved to a proper self hosted forum by now), but to be honest, I can't recall any truly active forums hosted on any of those services (the ones that I used to see as big had somewhat between 200-1000 members and about 100 000 posts maximum).

 

I can honestly say that I've never seen a freely hosted forum with such statistics - I've seen some reach similar amounts, but shortly after were asked to move to a proper host due to resource usage.

 

I've never heard of someone being forced to move from Invisionfree/Proboards/forumotion due to resource usage, unless you meant free hosts as in 'free hosts that offer PHP and MySQL and you install your own forum software'. But to be fair, most forums on free hosting fail before then anyway.

 

When these forums move to proper hosts, do they get to export their posts/members to bring the community along or do they basically have to start fresh?

 

They're generally given a backup of all relevant content - I've rarely seen forums simply deleted from their servers due to resource usage... it's more of a gesture on their part.

 

Unless they started on Proboards, who refuse to give anyone anything because they honestly deluded themselves into thinking a modded version of Yabb is custom software. You have to pay for backups on Invisionfree too, which does not help people who are moving their forum from there.

 

Just check the stats from those Forumotion forums...

- :: Hide Codes Galore ::
1030074 messages
89305 registered users

- V.C.N Server
345317 messages
37878 registered users

- Dragonscape Forums
150740 messages
13556 registered users

- Club Penguin Forums
176245 messages
10019 registered users


And all active forums (more than 100 members) get a free .com .net .org domain name...not bad heh?

 

The Club Penguin Planet Forums is also pretty large.

 

Yes indeed, forgot to mention that one

 

My forum was hosted by Exocrew for maybe half of the time it has existed (since 2004). Exocrew was a free forum host, as they provided a phpBB or IPB installation with phpMyadmin and FTP access, theoretically unlimited hard drive space and bandwidth, and no catch. Now, you must already have a forum with a good PR to be hosted. No matter, since I am now have a paid host. As to why I chose Exocrew, though: I was aware of the limitations of the more popular free forum hosts, and I wanted more. Most importantly, though, I wanted to be sure that I can save my data, and the greater freedom Exocrew provided me helped assure me that the content I value so much could remain safe, especially as dedicated as I am to perform a backup at least once a day.

Whether my forum can count as a free forum hosted success story depends on the definition of success. I am glad that I merely still have my content, that my staff and a few members are dedicated and close, and that a new member still comes every now and then, as my motivation was merely to run a forum, and one that lasts. My stats are 3,060 threads, 48,141 posts, and 673 members. However, it's not as impressive when you realize it's been around since 2004, and there were only fifty posts yesterday (and seventeen today). Also, if I understand the member who submitted the OP correctly, I did not get hosted by the "free forum hosts" in mind: the popular ones that people are most likely to find when searching using the Google.

However, I think it may count in this sense. It is my understanding that most forums that are freely hosted, do not have an especially tight niche that is well exploited (99.9% or more), and are not attached to a main web page, do not last long, and most are dead URLs waiting to happen real soon, or dead forums that never got off the ground. That said, my forum is still around, has moved on to a paid host and domain, has converted to vBulletin, and has had some of its better activity since its early days with no sign of the old staff losing interest.

 

I have a friend that has a Yuku forum. I've been offering to host it on my hosting with his own domain name, but he refuses to because of the Yuku community where you have one sign-in for all of their forums, and there's a pretty big prop forum that a lot of his members belong to.

The other problem is that he WOULD need to start fresh if he were to move to his own forum.