AgnosticBoy wrote: ↑Sun Jun 28, 2020 12:50 pm
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Replying to DavidLeon in post #15]
The forum here uses Phpbb web application , which is free. But without a hosting account, where would you store the site?
Is your forum still running? I'd like an example.
I don't want this to be considered spam, so I will leave only one link to a free host that I have nothing to do with except for that I've used them as free and paid hosting. I've used probably a dozen of them over the years.
Though I don't have any forums up and running, I've run Phpbb applications exactly like this, as well as Simple Machine and others absolutely free. You store the site, with or without a forum, on a free host like the last one I used -
Byet Host, which provides free hosting with no advertisement or banner, unlimited disc space and bandwidth, use your own domain if I'm not mistaken, you might want to check that, etc.
I've found the free hosting to be all I needed but if you want more goodies you can use their paid services. Certainly under $100 a year. The very basic, all one should ever need unless you have a mega site probably around $50 a year.
ETA: Just for fun and old times sake I will post links to the Wayback Machine (Internet Archive) of some of my old websites. The first one is old. Though the captures I'm linking to are from 2011 the website goes back much farther than that. It was a simple HTML site. Nothing fancy but I think beautiful. Not very practical. Like an old antique piece of furniture.
The Pathway Machine Wayback doesn't preserve all of the site so huge portions of it are missing. That host required a small banner at the bottom of each page but if I'm not mistaken it wouldn't appear unless you went for one month without editing any pages. I don't think that host any longer offers free service and I wouldn't recommend it if it did because there are so many others that offer more with no banner.
For some reason the menus on these pages isn't working on my end. I've noticed if I close all other tabs and refresh the page the menus appear as they should.
A somewhat more polished version is
here.
I usually prefer the simple design, but I've had free sites that were as complex as you can go. Bootstrap, full page video or image headers, mega menus, etc. Well, my last template can be found
here.
My favorite is
this version which is very practical but looks a great deal less dated than the others. I think the host on this one was ipage, which was a good host but with limited free goodies. Mysql etc. Again, the images and huge parts of the site are missing but you get the general idea. Wayback only preserves textual content they can't find elsewhere, although you can find much of what they preserved on forums all over the Internet. I've found stuff I've written posted in it's entirety by people I've never heard of, which I encourage. No permission, credit or copyright needed. I've never charged or accepted donations and have only ever had advertising back in the day when you had to on things like free forums, chat rooms, guestbooks. All that stuff you get free with an account like the one linked above.