Does your website have a forum?
 

I am about to start working on our website for this year and I was wondering how many team's website have forums. So... Does your website have a forum, and if it does what do you use it for?

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Check your school's policy. Our district has been strict on forums.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

It has been a great resource for our team with planning and staying organized. Here is a link;
http://www.edinarobotics.com/forum/
Check it out!

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Yes and you are on it :p

but seriously with how much CD is read by my team it basically is. For my team, we are relatively small 20-30 students, email and msn are perfectly good communication tools for those few hours they are not together at school building.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We have a pretty heavily used forum... and a wiki. We basically use it for archiving and documentation, as well as keeping information central.

in reality a forum is not so much as important as a wiki is, because you can use a wiki to document things that do work, and things that dont work. Same thing can be done with a forum, but its more difficult.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

How would you go about creating a forum for your website?

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

It does but it doesn't work yet.:(

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

G.R.R 340-424 has one it's at http://www.team340.org/smf/ come join

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We use a forum on the iBots team. its where we post discussion and talk about ideas and share files. it is currently running PHPBB3 and its really easy to administer and use.

...forest

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We have a wiki instead of a forum. Unfortunately, it is rarely used. However, I send out emails after every meeting/build session to keep people posted.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

You would go online, download a forum package, then put it into the site's directory. Then you would set up the php.ini file, and set up the database, usually MySQL or some other proprietary. Then you would configure the forum, usually through an installer page (if you are using phpBB, vBulletin, or another phpBB spinoff), in which you would post information for admin settings and database information. Next, you would log in and customize settings for the users and administrators, and you would be done.

If you have your site professionally hosted (through a hosting site or something), then you should be able to access an Administrative Control Panel, and you should be able to have them set up a forum package on your site automatically. On my team's site, which uses GoDaddy.com, we were able to set up the forums through their site admin panel in about two minutes. It's MUCH simpler.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

I set up ours over the summer. I used proboards (not blocked at work) and it is pretty easy to set things up and customize them. We then just put a link on our website to the forums.

Heres the link:

http://sgtmillhouse648.proboards85.com/index.cgi

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Our team was ordered to take ours down because of our school district living in the stone age.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We have one, and it was started in 2006. Since then I have been given "Super Moderator" powers. I was actually surprised in myself, as I was able to upgrade from phpbb2 to 3 by myself. I know almost nothing about making a website, so I am proud of myself. :D
I remember we considered this a good thing for communication in the chairman's award in 2006, so we said that we added one to our website, then we said that we hope it would soon get as big as CD. That never happened, and thank god because we don't have near the server power/space available to do that. In fact, we had to delete our wiki recently to make room for the beast we call a history project.

EDIT: www.technokats.org/forum and www.technokats.org/historyproject.php

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

I've tried; when I registered on your forums, it would not let me post and it said I was only a Guest. And I'm assuming your forum setup doesn't allow guests to post new threads or anything. You should really get on that.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

http://forum.adambots.com has been setup not just for my team but for help with our FIRST on Linux initiative, AdamBots-Live and our website resource project, AdamBots eMedia. I'm just about always over there, and can get you help much quicker that I can here.

If you have any troubles registering, let me know.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

This is the first year that team 1675 has a forum,we are running phpbb 2. I think it works great, because we used to talk though email, now the forum we have about 30+ subject being talking about everyday.
:D
Its super easy to setup and mod.

http://team1675.org/forum/index.php

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We set up a forum, and its been a great help to our team. You can check out the open part of it at: http://penfieldrobotics.com/forum

With 5295 posts we make great use of it (and have some fun!)

We have also set up a hidden side of it. Each of the subteams has their own build season section, and we have a Build Season Board that has our engineering notebooks, integration notes, and Safety section. There is also a hidden board for awards. This allows us to discuss all of our build season things, and release them to the public only after build season is through.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Our team does have a forum. Anyone can access it and for our team, it is a great way to communicate because we don't see all of our mentors at school. I would recommend any and all teams to have one because again it is a good way to communicate when email and myspace:D fail.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We have a forum somewhat on our site. Our server wouldn't let me instal some stuff so it scrached the idea from starting from somewhere instead of scratch, so I googled free forum sites and ended up going with freeforums.org, check out our forum out at http://whitebearlakerobotics.freeforums.org just recently though they put the ads on the site to cover costs for maintnence but other wise it is nice

I agree with 234smidget about it is a good way to communicate, we discused Ideas problems, what to do better, and more on our forum. It is only a good way to communicate if most of your members look at it(which is somewhat a problem for us)

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

we got one... http://www.jchrobotics.com/forums/smf/ it isn't being used much right now... but anyone that wants to can join!:D

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

we have a forum at forums.fairportfirst.com. It is used really heavily by some members of our team (With over 10000 posts and 500 topics since it began last February), and every team member has an account there, but only 10 of the 40-50 members on our team regularly post on it. (Luckily it's the ones who are really into the team)
We use our forums for communication by posting events that are upcoming, but we also use it to discuss different ideas for our robot design, post summaries of each subteam's work they completed for future reference, try to figure out another team's robot's function by a picture that was posted, think of events we could organize, or discuss things like the future leadership or recruiting.
For the members of our team that utilise it, our team's forum is a huge help.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Our team has a forum..... chiefdelphi.com

Ok I had to say it.

But also we have a student website that is done by James, Ciara and Kelsey
check it out as it has a lot of information.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Our site has forums and a wiki, but you need to be a member of the team to access them since the forum login and wiki login are both linked to our attendance system. The forums and wiki are dedicated to team collaboration and to keep track of projects. I always found CD to be good enough for anything public.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Our forum is our main source of communication for our team. We talk about EVERYTHING there. From what time we have to be at school in the morning for the bus to what the next step for our programming code should be. It's become a really essential part of our organization.

http://forums.mercury1089.com

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Basically, our fora are for what Billy said (above). I didn't realize he had replied to this thread... so I voted in the poll. Sorry.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

I am an experienced community builder, as well as the webmaster for Team 548. IPB has always been #1 for community software. However, for free, phpBB3, is virtually bugless now, and runs great. Our team uses phpBB3 to power our forums. You can check them out here:

http://robostangs.com/forums

EDIT: Feel free to register and play around with it.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

our team has a forum, but, after some pretty bad NSFW spam we got, we don't use it any more...

i wouldn't suggest starting a forum unless you can get 24h monitoring.

most of our team just uses either our irc channel, or the cd forums...

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Our team uses a forum as a tool for club communication. Some of our best robot design work has come from forum posts made well after our club meetings ended. The forum is also useful for continuing discussions that span several meetings and keeping members up to date.

The first thing we tell any new team member is "get a forum account and check it regularly."

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

Get phpbb3, free and there's no spam.

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

I do recommend IPB if a group can afford it. Awesome piece of software.

Our site is somewhat in shambles, but we used phpBB3. Not too many people from an already small team were on it often. Basically CD is our forums now. ;)

Re: Does your website have a forum?
 

We've had a forum on our site for some time now. Of course it wasn't until a few days ago we got the school district to actually unblock it. :rolleyes:

Our forum uses the Invision Free hosting service (haven't convinced the team to shell out the money for the new software version unfortunately). Invision forums are sweet though, regardless of the version. If you have the money for the full version, I highly recommend it. :cool: