Does your website have a forum?

[nekng]

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?

[Pavan Dave]

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

[minirose224]

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!

[Jonathan Norris]

Yes and you are on it

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.

[Uberbots]

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.

[mynameisbob]

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

[ShotgunNinja]

Originally Posted by mynameisbob

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

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.

[SgtMillhouse648]

Originally Posted by mynameisbob

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

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

[themagic8ball]

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

[Schnabel]

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.
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

[smurfgirl]

Originally Posted by Uberbots

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.

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.

[MiniNerd24]

It does but it doesn't work yet.

[colin340]

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

[fimmel]

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

[Blue_Mist]

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.