ActiveBoard

Anyone can make a website these days, including a forum, but before you make or buy a forum, consider the following:

According to many web designers, it’ll only take you nine hours, supposedly. What’s the catch, you ask? Well, according to the experts, you will, at a minimum, need to be able to program using HTML and CSS. It’ll also help a ton if you know how to bootstrap and do graphic design. Further, it will help a ton when getting traffic if you know how to do search engine optimization and know how to blog.

Otherwise, prepare to have a moolah to buy up a bunch of traffic or doing something similar.

Speaking of spending money, you can buy a forum on several websites which I have written about elsewhere on this website. The thing is, as with buying up traffic, these premade message boards can cost you, and that doesn’t mean anyone wants to hang out on them. After all, think about how many forums that you can think of that already have a following.

And if you don’t think you are competing with a ton of people, just Google forum and see how many hits popup.

There is a way to split the difference between the two – creating your own with the assistance of a web service that you can find on ActiveBoard.com. By the end of this article, you will see why I am rather enthusiastic about the web service provided on this site.

Here Are The Tools That This Site Offers

Getting going from start to finish is a snap

Every element of this web service is made so that, well, like that commercial, “a caveman can do it.” You don’t have to worry about downloading software and having it take up space on your hard drive. Why is that? Well, this service is entirely cloud-based and also secure.

You don’t have to worry about bothering with buying a server either, since Active Board has you covered there as well. Moreover, you don’t even know how to code. Since this service is data-based, you just need to know how to read and envision what you want to create.

Even if you do run into an issue, this service is backed up by SparkLIT’s support staff.

Once uploaded, this site is entirely user friendly

Another problem with buying someone else’s forum, or trying to program it yourself, is ensuring that your visitors have a good, easy time while posting on it. Think about it; no one likes being on a slow or unresponsive website of any sort, even if it appeals to their most intense interests.

Of course, Active Board has a suite of features to maximize user enjoyment. Naturally, all of the basics are included, such as standard thread creation options and Facebook-inspired live chat options. Speaking of Facebook, this service allows you to do deep integrations of other social media services like Facebook, Twitter, etc.

Want to make it so that users can share media, be it a .pdf, .png, .jpeg, or whatever? They have tools to incorporate those features as well. That applies to the design tools too. You don’t need to be an Adobe Illustrator expert to create a lovely-looking message platform.

The load times are lightning fast as they should be, you practically won’t have to worry about your website going down for any appreciable amount of time, and all packages provide advanced spam.

The specific number of threads people can post varies by subscription (read on to find out about that), but they have plans that provide plenty of posting options for any budget and level of web traffic.

They support multiple languages, too

Since I know that I have an international audience and tend to focus on English-based sites and services, some of you are wondering, is Active Board international friendly? Well, as it turns out, yes, it is. At least if you speak most major European and East Asian languages.

In addition to the tongue of Britannia and the big western (German, French, Danish, and Dutch), major European romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian) are supported along with others such as Finnish, Swedish, Hungarian, and Greek, among others. Furthermore, Asiatic languages are supported – i.e., Russian, Japanese, and Chinese. Does it sound like this is a service that you can use yet?

Want To Get Started, They’ve Got A Special Deals Going

They say the best things in life are free, and in some ways, that is true. But when it comes to web services like these, you will have to shell out at least a little bit of money. However, as we will see, getting set up with a service like this will not break your bank account.

They have a free trial and more

If you are sold on this site, then I have some good news for you. As with just about any worthwhile web service, you can sign up for a thirty-day trial! All you need to do is give them your email and password, and you should be set up in a matter of minutes most likely.

What’s more, this web service provides another special deal for those who sign up for a yearly agreement to get a nice 15% off on their package. Or at least that’s what they used to give out. These days, they are still giving out 50% off! Not only that, but they provide you satisfaction within a window of that time.

And now to move onto the pricing plans themselves.

The pricing plans aren’t going to gouge you

Let’s get into perhaps the (other) big question – what are you going to have to spend? As it turns out, not too damn much. As stated, all memberships are half off, with Starter packages costing $6.40 a month, Pro memberships being priced at $17.98 for the same period, and a Premium sub will run you $99.50.

There are only a few significant differences, as all packages provide spam filtering and chat room support. You also won’t have to put up with Active Board watermarks or branding appearing on your site with all packages. Unlike the other two, Starter packages don’t have API Access, and you can only have 10,000 members total and are capped at 1,000,000 threads. The other two packages allow for API Access and unlimited users, topics, threads, etc.

However, buying a Starter membership should not be a problem for you if you are just getting going. Hell, if you do it right, you should easily be able to monetize your forum and easily afford the larger packages. And yes, you can change your membership at any time.

The only other major differences between packages are the page views allowed for the month. Starter packages level off at 100,000 per month with the capacity to get an extra thousand for fifteen cents. Pro memberships will get you 2.5 times that amount with another 1k running $0.12, and a Premium plan will get you up to two million every thirty days with $0.07 per thousand extra.

I’ll tell you what, in all the reviews on services like this that I’ve done, those are damn good deals to me.

Got any questions? There are two ways to get answers

Lastly, if you have follow-up queries, then there are two ways you can get your curiosity satisfied. As you would expect, they have an email address that you can get support through once you register with them. Even better, there is a toll-free number wherein you can get help at 1.877.275.5480. But before you do, I’d read through the pricing page, which has a decent number of answered questions.

My Opinion Of This Forum Maker Is…

Now my regular readers will note that I often have a list of critiques when looking at a web service like this. And they also know that I am incredibly honest and straightforward, too – this is a bullshit-free zone.

Honestly, I almost came up dry when trying to find something negative about this platform. If I had to bring up a couple of things, it would only be this. 1.) I would like it if they provided more samples of what this software can do, and 2.) It’d be super if they offered testimonials from people who have used Active Forums.

Other than that, this website provides an adequate number of features to build a message forum. In fact, they claim that their largest clients get 100 million page views a month. Furthermore, everyone from “fan clubs to Fortune 500 companies uses ActiveBoard” with apparently 100,000+ total users – pretty impressive, eh?

I suppose after fourteen years of being in this business, this sort of quality is to be expected.