Free forums! (proboards.com)

Member Name: sparksteroid

Product:	proboards.com
Date:	14/08/09 (16 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: It's free, easy, reliable and highly configurable

Disadvantages: Ad-support so you can't have your own ads

Proboards in an online service that offers anybody free forums, either to be hosted on their own or as part of your website. Proboards claim to be hosting over twenty million members at three million forums. Proboards have their own login system to go with the forums too and everything is hosted on their server on your behalf. However, they do place advertising on your forums to pay for them.

The home page is simple, clean and welcoming and contains a basic menu on the left, and four boxes in the centre of the screen each with a different category. All together the home page shows a welcome section, the latest news, featured boards/forums and quick stats including the number of boards hosted, number of registered users and the number of threads and posts made.

Registration is a simple and easy process, you can have your forums up and running literally within a couple of minutes. Once registered you have access to a control panel with an extremely wide range of functions. From here you can set the disussion titles and leave a description or guidelines for users to follow.

Security is also easily configurable from the control panel with just about every facility you could ever think of needing. This includes the ability to ban users, moderate offensive content like swearing, allow administrators to edit posts and close threads, add administrative users and much more.

Proboards is an excellent, effective, reliable and free way for anyone to get their own forum online and up and running within a matter of minutes and can run it exactly the way they want. Unfortunately, if your forum becomes popular you won't be able to make any money directly from it as you are not allowed your own advertising but it's free, easy and fun and can come in very useful, especially for those who don't have the technical know-how.

Summary: A great free and reliable service which is flexible