forum platform

[Hazel in Sk]

I am not a 'techie' person. If I was I could probably find answers to my questions somewhere online

I belong to a discussion group hosted by a different platform (I think that is the term used for the basic handling system!). The other platform is asking for too much money to update and so the discussion area is planned for deletion by the owners. The people using the discussion would like to continue.

I got thinking about this site that would do much the same things and started wondering............

how much does it cost?
is that a one time payment or is there also an annual fee?
is it registered to one person's name?
is it pretty easy to keep running?
will it eventually demand a huge payment for an upgrade?

I realise these questions are a bit off-topic on a camper site and should the site owner want to delete my questions and reply privately that would be fine with me. Basically I'm just looking for possibilities of continuing the discussions we have been having elsewhere for several years.

[Bob Miller]

You can consider setting it up as a "Yahoo Group", that's free. I have a group of my own as well belonging to several others there.

[Hazel in Sk]

I appreciate the suggestion but, others in the group have already said No to Yahoo Groups, FB, Twitter and Instagram. Something along the lines of this forum is likely what is wanted - but they are still hoping to get it free. I suspect that that won't happen.

[Donna D.]

You get what you pay for. This forum is owned by Social Knowledge. One of many, many forums SK owns. If you can't pay to host it yourself, you'll always be at the mercy of all the information just gooooing away. I expect that will happen someday for all the YahooGroups and Facebook. But, I don't have a crystal ball!

[Bob Miller]

Yahoo Groups isn't at all like the others you mentioned, in fact it's more like this site.
But again, you get what you pay for and, if you don't want to pay you will get lots of ads and pop-ups.

[Daniel A.]

I own a forum in Canada for metal detecting.

The site has been running for almost eight years considered a success as most forum sites never make it past a year.

There is an annual fee for the Domain not much.
Then there is the hosting charge all sites need a host costs vary depending on package. It could be anywhere from 100.00 a year up with plenty of factors.

Then there is maintaining the site I have a developer that looks after my site upgrades and changes.
Sites must stay current and when a board is no longer supported one must upgrade to stay this costs money again depending on how much work is involved.
My site has gone through two major upgrades and it has taken three days just to transfer from the old board to the new one.
I spend around 2000.00 a year maintaining my site.

Custom builds costs much more but don't need to worry about support issues. It can cost 5- 10 thousand for a custom build.

[mrprez]

You could start off at ProphpBB - Free Forum Hosting.

[Hazel in Sk]

Thanks for the suggestions - I'll pass them on for consideration.