Try, Try, Try Again

 Ok. Most, if not all, of you know I have wanted to have a Forum for the Working at Home on the Internet Webpage and Blogs. I think it is a great way to build a community and to share information.

I tried the old phpBB format for Forums. It was a total failure. I got totally fed up with the Spammers, Spam Comments, Bogus members who signed up to Spam and I won’t even mention the porn sites that I had to eliminate from the threads.

 Well, I started looking for something a little easier to handle. Since I use WordPress, I wanted something to incorporate easily with the Blog, manage Spam and still have the versatility of having a Forum.

The first plug-in I tried was a total disaster. XDForums did not work well at all. I had to download a zip file, that part was easy. I had to upload 1200 folders and files to my server. One at a time. That took HOURS. After I had Finally completed the upload, the only thing that seemed to work was that it installed a page for the forum automatically. Nothing else would function. Every time I tried to access the page/forum I would get a 404 error. I spent almost as much time on Their Forum looking for answers as I did uploading files.

I tried installing it on 2 different Blogs, and neither worked. At all. So, I gave up.

Then I started looking again for a different and more compatible plug-in to add a Forum to the Blog.

I came across RS Discuss by Rob Sargent. Interesting, I thought. A nice lightweight Forum plug-in for WordPress. The download is what you would expect, a zip file. What was unexpected was I only had to upload 4 folders and 30 files. Total. After the last fiasco, I figured this was worth a 20 minute investment.

I tested it on the Freeware Finds blog and it worked fine. The only problem I had with the installation on this Blog was that the Theme (Andreas04 2.0) was missing a php file in the header. Once I added the file, it worked well enough to continue with the actual set-up of the various categories and threads for the New Forum.

 This Forum is not a real fancy type with all the bells and whistles. It is fairly basic and since it is based on (WordPress) the blog, it will have some of the same features of navigation. But, it will also have some of the features you would expect of a php based Forum like viewing threads and conversations as well as commenting on the Forum. Registration looks fairly easy, but I set it up for user verification through E-mail. Members will be assigned a password (which can be changed after sign-up). This was done to try to alleviate some of the Spam and bogus member sign-ups.

So far, I like what I see.

I plan on launching the New and Improved Working at Home on the Internet Forum on February 1, 2007. Although the Forum is a work in progress, if you would like to be an “early bird”, go to the coming soon page and register. I can use all the help I can get.

Let me know what you think and Please, offer suggestions. 

[tags]XDForums,RS Discuss,WordPress,plugins,forums,Working at Home on the Internet, Joe’s Freeware Finds[/tags]