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Phorum
phorum.org
If you want to build a porn site, you’re probably looking for the easiest way of doing that. Well, perhaps it should be a porn forum website. I found a system that will allow you to create a forum website for free. All you’ll need is some knowledge in PHP, and you’re ready to go. In fact, you can just set up the base version of the system, and it will work; although, it just might not look that great unless you touch the code. This system is called Phorum.org.
This program has existed for over two decades
Phorum is a project developed back in 1998 for a bargain site called dealnews.com. They needed a forum for users, and so a man called Brian Moon founded Phorum. Back then, it was called Phorum 3, but because of the many hacker attacks that happened with forums running this system, Maurice Makaay and Moon created Phorum 5. Maurice joined the team in 1999 because he needed Phorum for his site about guitarists and shit. But since he is a developer, he decided that enough was enough with the hacks and developed the new version in 2005. This is a module for the forum system. It has already been developed, and Maurice has been working on it ever since.
Another core dev on the team is Thomas Seifert. Now, Thomas is a Kraut, and he joined the team in 2001. He was a user of Phorum for a year and then decided that his genius could better be used to create a hosting platform based on Phorum. He has since explored this system to its deepest depths and decided to share everything back with the community—a pretty swell guy. But yeah, Brian eventually left the team and the project to work as the lead web engineer for that bargain website I talked about earlier. I sure hope there’s no bad blood between these guys.
Super easy installation in just five steps
So, as you can see, this program has been around for more than two decades, and it’s one of the OG pieces of software for porn webmasters to create message boards online using PHP and MySQL. Porn webmasters sure had a field day with Phorum.org because they could keep downloading the software for free and make one porn forum site after another. Now, I don’t recommend doing that today since the market is a bit saturated, but if you need to get a porn site out there and want to get it out fast, this is the best solution. It just works so damn well and is simple to install.
The entire installation can be summarized in just five easy steps. First of all, download the zipped file containing the software from Phorum.org. Then, unpack the thing into a directory below your website’s document root. After that, it’s time to make a DB and a user with full access to that DB. And by the way, DB stands for a database. The fourth step is to edit the file that you have unpacked, include/db/config.php.sample, and save it as include/db/config.php. Finally, the last step is to open up the /admin.php part of your domain in your browser and finish up with the installation. As I said, it’s quick, simple, easy, and it won’t take you that long to set the basic things up for your site.
Read the docs or the forums if you get stuck
If you have any trouble with the installation process, you can find the documentation on Phorum.org, and there’s even a support forum if you can’t find your answer in the docs. But listen, I am almost 100% sure that you can find all the information that you need in the documentation. And if your question is related to PHP4 in any way, forget about it. People have moved on, and PHP5 is the golden standard now. Anyway, that’s not to say you can’t use PHP4, just that it’s not entirely recommended. But yeah, if you ever get stuck, there’s a huge community of fans who are more than glad to answer your questions about Phorum. You can find this under the “community” tab on the Phorum.org website if you need it.
There are a couple of key reasons as to why you should consider using Phorum for your porn forum site. Heck, you can even think about using it as an add-on for an existing porn site. If you already have a porn tube site, a forum would make the experience much better for some users who want to share their content with others and talk with other people who are fans of the same kind of porn content. Porn forums are a crucial aspect from now on, especially with the social climate that we live in today. You want to add this as a porn webmaster.
High performance and flexibility
Some of the key “selling points” for this free software are that it has great performance, high levels of being customizable, both in terms of the features, functionalities, and design. All of these things are important for a porn forum website, so it’s a good thing that Phorum.org doesn’t forget about any of these things and takes them seriously. But let’s start with the performance since I find that really important. For a porn forum site, I can’t imagine that you’re going to be running a lot of steam in the beginning, but if you do need to run a lot of forums at once for many people, this is the software for that. You can run 4000 or even more forums and not see a drop in performance at all.
As for the freedom to switch things up, you can do with Phorum as you see fit. As you can see on their website, they don’t care about branding and shit like that. They just created this project out of passion, and they live off of donations. You can donate as little as $5 to show your appreciation, and the highest donation you can send is $200. I can’t believe they put a cap on this for some reason. Donations are run through PayPal, so if you want to do that, you’re going to need an account and wallet there. But going back to that freedom aspect, you really can do a lot here.
Hasn’t been updated in a while
The only thing that I will say bugs me a bit is that they don’t seem to be doing much with the project anymore. The last news that I can see is that they released Phorum 5.2 in 2006 and that they went to a hackathon in 2007. That’s old news, guys; you should update the site with new information! Of course, new releases keep happening, and the current version of Phorum is 5.2.23. Anyway, if you try to go to “Read more” for that story, you get a broken page, so I don’t think that they’re paying attention to anything going on with their website at the moment, which is a shame.
But still, you’ll find that many sites are using Phorum as their software of choice for their forum. Now, I’m not going to say that I’m 100% sure about all the names that I’m about to drop, but basically, it seems that even MySQL.com is using this software for their forum section. There’s also Lycos Europe, MySnip.de, the official website for the president of Mexico, dealnews.com (of course, because of Brian), and Cruise-@ddicts, a community for cruises. Anyway, I’m not sure if all those sites still use this software, given that Phorum.org hasn’t really seen any updates to the site, but it’s still a great system!
PornDude likes Phorum's
- Completely free message board software
- Easy to install and even easier to use
- Great performance, and very customizable
PornDude hates Phorum's
- The site hasn’t been updated in over a decade
- The base design of Phorum is abysmal
- The docs can be quite a lot to take in