There was a time when the Internet was dominated by discussion forums and phpBB, the application that concerns us today, was one of the most relevant within the Open Source Community. Although the popularity of discussion forums has declined due to the rise of Social Networks, they remain an excellent resource for virtually bringing our users together and opening avenues of collaboration between them: ultimately, creating a Community among our audience. In addition, phpBB is another of the applications that we can deploy in a matter of seconds on the Arsys Cloud Servers and thus we will manage all the computing capacity we need without complications and with a single click.
Traditional forums, among which phpBB is the most widespread application, are sites where users virtually gather around a particular topic and openly participate in conversations. They are organized into categories and, in each of them, we find discussion threads created and participated by the users themselves. The simplicity of its mechanics is one of the characteristics that has made discussion forums one of the oldest formats in terms of interactivity and that we can still see today. For example, in many Customer Service initiatives.
phpBB is an open source application, distributed under the GNU license, so we can use it for any type of purpose and get to modify it at will to adapt it to our needs, also some of the most outstanding characteristics of this system are:
▸Create communities of any size, from simple forums to forums organized by many categories with thousands of threads.
▸An enormous amount of functionalities for the moderation of the content inserted by the user, both automatic for filtering the content and eliminating spam, as well as manual. There can be moderators of various types, global or particular for a category. Moderation queues are generated to facilitate the organization of work. There is the possibility of configuring each section in a granular way, blocking posts or topics, dividing them, joining them, etc.
▸It allows making public and private posts and sending messages between users.
▸Almost any type of content can be associated with posts, from images, rich text, files, emoticons, surveys, etc.
▸It allows defining how the Community will be, whether it is open to registration by anyone, limited registration, by invitation, etc. In addition, users are able to obtain custom permissions by administrators.
▸It offers numerous antispam tools: captchas, control of the number of publications and their limit by users, user ban systems and account suspension, etc. In addition, it offers various utilities for detecting suspicious situations, so that editors can find out about anomalies before anyone else.
▸The style is fully customizable using graphic themes.
