Hosting a Forum

[Arkhinor]

Heya

Looking at doing something like THIS *looks around* for my current workplace in the hope to keep in contact with the people (go figure)

Have been looking at another forum about Web Hosting - curious i suppose to know from people i know that may know a little about this but
a) Server stuff - what kinda setup is necessary...granted i know very little and we already have someone hosting our website - spose its their problem?
b) Security of such a server
c) Adminning such a diverse community (most of which will be teenagers with parents probably quite willing to read overshoulder and ensure we're not putting their children in any danger of exposure to undesirable content

bluntly - any info on where to start would be sick!
Cheers
Ark

[Azazel]

Running forums isn't very difficult if you know anything about html, unix and mysql. At least, the phpBB based forums I've used require some knowledge of about that - maybe some css and ftp skills too.

If you're not that good - and don't have shell access to a server (running the minimum version of necessary apps) - then there are "free" web based forums out there. Most of them have advertisements all over them - but they're free and you don't need to be as knowledgable to run them.

I have no experience with this one:

http://www.freeforums.org/

I've used this, but they've changed some - they used to be ezboards:

http://www.yuku.com/

If you're comfortable with actually hosting and running your own, here's what we use:

http://www.phpbb.com/