2005-07-10: Adding discussion forums to your website requires more than just nicely designed pages. You need programs on the web server to accept forum postings, fetch existing forum postings from a database, and so on. Fortunately there is excellent free forum software available written in PHP. phpBB is a powerful forum system that provides individual user accounts, forum postings with support for more than just plain text, message threads and a great deal more. And it's free and completely open source. So we recommend it highly.

Those who host their websites on Microsoft operating systems may wish to check out communityserver, a free ASP.NET website forum software package.

There's one important catch with phpBB, communityserver and other third-party software you use on your website: you need to keep an eye on the program's website and install any upgrades that are released to fix security problems. Please take this seriously -- do not allow your website to be wiped out by a malicious web "worm" that takes advantage of security holes in older versions of popular forum software.

Legal Note: yes, you may use sample HTML, Javascript, PHP and other code presented above in your own projects. You may not reproduce large portions of the text of the article without our express permission.

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