As you can see from my posts on here I am a TOTAL NEWBIE...

I am assiatant manager to an MSN group with a global membership that provides a light relief to fellow Prostate Cancer (PCa) sufferers and we and we have just launched our own URL Bollocks to Pca. - please take a look and also at our lunch site via the menu. The site is soley intended for the fun things in life we have enough trouble with the poxy diease. It's not commercial by any means and there are no £s/$s to splash out on development.

Obviously we would like to include a new Forum where the users can commiunicate, swop jokes (which are mostly rude), life stories etc and there are many freebie forums out there that support this need. However, thinking about what we need the key aspects are;

• Admin approval for new member registration that includes a question about their involvemnt with Prostate Cancer
• ability to insert jpg/gif into postings and other stuff such as sounds, short vids etc.
• Easy access to the Forum members database so that we can use the forum User ID and P/word for access to private pages on the site - unified log in (?). {I guess the easily way is to use the Forum as a gateway/portal but I have yet to find a freebee forum where you can add a menu to give access to such pages.}
• Easily managed and tweaked by the admin without needing a doctorate in computer science.
• Free

Eh? That's it

I am likely to be the poor sucker that gets to do all the hard work and my techie background is very limited. Previous experience is FP2k and Plagerism is my middle name. I can get around in FTP and run the odd tweaks in files but not much more - my development has been "poke and hope" and learning as I go along. I am hitting a steep learning curve regarding asp.net, php etc and downside of that is it will keep me out the pub

I have loaded up SMF on the site but it doesn't support some of the items on my list and it's a bit "techie" - so back to sqaure one.

So, what can you guys and gals recommend to me (that isn't rude) ?

Thanks in advance
Cheers
Bernie

For a newbie, I'd have to agree that SMF is quite complex, if you're looking for a good Freebie, then I would recommend MyBB or phpBB.

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Yes, definitely consider using either MyBB, or phpBB. Personally, I would recommend MyBB over phpBB, simply because I feel that it has a superior feature set + is more reliable, but both pieces of software are very easy to use.

Chris

I would have to agree with MyBB or phpBB. You can demo both of them here if you'd like. I'd also recommend looking into phpBB3. It offers much much more than phpBB2. It's not in its final release stage yet, that's why we haven't added it to our demo system. It is very close to final release though.

I don't know whether or not MyBB and phpBB can offer videos and sounds to be included in posts - I don't think they will by default, but there may be a mod that can do that. The rest of your requirements can be done with MyBB and phpBB. As far as private access - What kind of material are you looking to put there? Because it might be easiest to just set up private sections in your forum that only certain members can access. Both MyBB and phpBB support this.

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...some super-sweet signature

The only thing with phpBB is that it does require file edits if you use hacks to add features. Or at least it did when I was using it. For this reason (and other reasons) I went for vBulletin. But ya know, vBulletin is not free.