Does your website have a forum?

[RyanCesiel]

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.

[DB_UPS]

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.

Its super easy to setup and mod.

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

[Kims Robot]

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.

[234smidget]

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 fail.

[Cow Bell Solo]

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)

[Martino]

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

[commodoredl]

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.

[Mike Martus]

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.

[Ctrl Alt Delete]

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.

[BandChick]

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

[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.

[HotWings]

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.

[ZInventor]

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...

[Matt H.]

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."

[RyanCesiel]

Originally Posted by T2002 Webmaster

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...

Get phpbb3, free and there's no spam.