KC Forums

As someone who helps run a modding community that's largely confined to a Discord server, I'd like to take some notes from anybody with experience in this field. What does it take to run a forum/website going into 2023, and what kind of challenges does it present?

Specific questions I had:

• Do you use your own hardware to host the website, or do you offload the grunt work to someone else?
• How are the monetary costs to keep the server running month-to-month?
• Keeping your users and website secure and protected against vulnerabilities - is this an ongoing worry? How much of it boils down to configuring your website properly and keeping everything up to date? How much is taken care of automatically by the software you're running?
• What does a prospective website admin need to know and have a good grasp on before they try hosting a website to the public?

I'd be grateful for any insight and wisdom on the subject. Thanks!

I haven't run a forum since about 2012, but from experience I always preferred running off dedicated or shared hosts VS your own hardware. With the amount of bots and bullshit out there I'd rather the onus be on the host to ensure my site is up and running.

I constantly ran into having bots take over and flood each board with ads for p*rn sites, dating sites, fat loss pills, you name it.
Getting users was very hard as well - with most users these days preferring mobile access and uniformity, Discord is always going to win over old school forums, especially with the younger generation.

I haven't been running this forum for very long so take these with a grain of salt (I have run them in the past, also around 2008-2012, but that's a long time ago now and the user count for those never exceeded 10-20):

• I think it's generally smarter to offload it to a VPS. It's fairly cheap and saves you a lot of work/maintenance. It's also slightly safer in that there's less chance of you exposing your home IP and getting DDoS'd, etc. VPS providers will often have better upload speeds than your home internet too.
• This is kind of a mid-level VPS and costs around $10/month. If there were a lot of users, we might need more, but for now this is handling perfectly fine.
• I think most security concerns boil down to proper configuration nowadays. Most software involved is battle-tested and thankfully either defaults to secure options (e.g. phpBB's bcrypt password hashing and token validation) or is fairly simple to set up securely (e.g. mysql_secure_installation, HTTPS, etc.) Using a password manager with long randomized unique passwords for everything will also help prevent people from getting into restricted areas.

I think the biggest challenge you'll have, as arizonapalms said, is just getting people to visit regularly. With more convenient and centralized ways to talk to people, forums are easy to forget about unless you have a way to keep people coming back.

MattKC wrote: ↑Wed Dec 21, 2022 6:39 pm I think the biggest challenge you'll have, as arizonapalms said, is just getting people to visit regularly. With more convenient and centralized ways to talk to people, forums are easy to forget about unless you have a way to keep people coming back.

I opted out of such conveniences myself since I have no one to talk to there , in my opinion, while they are made so that thoughts of one could be brought up really quickly, they are not good at organise those thoughts themselves. They are also usually arbitrarily inaccessible and/or limited for monetarily greedy reason. Sadly those services are enough to most people since they just want to communicate to each others no matter what without really putting much thought on the value of Internet itself

I'm with you on that one flatrute. Whilst I mainly use Discord as a means of communication these days - I do prefer a tech that's more open and preferable accessible from any platform (see: Retro PC's, etc).

Maybe I can just sit on IRC all day

A website and a forum are complete different things.

You could create a website with a static web site generator and publish it on your shitty router, because it doesn't take resources at all and it is online 24/7. Or you could ask a friend if you could publish it on their servers, because everyone who manages a server (or v-server) wouldn't even recognize a static web site on their server, because it just doesn't need resources.

A dynamic website like a forum needs much more resources. A Raspberry Pi is the first thing, what comes into my head, but even the newest one could be overpowered and you could even put a mumble server and a game server on it and it still work perfectly.

If you want to do it a little bit more professionally and you expect a lot of people to use your site and want to be reliable (no down time), I recommend to rent a v-server for 10 to 20 bugs. But because of their shared resources, even they are overpowered for a forum alone.

But because your question was "What does it take to run a forum these days?", I want to mention the social aspects, especially the behavior of the people in the 20s, which I listed in this post, which could get problematic very fast and should be handled asap, because I know people who gave up managing a forum, because of the people.