I’ve finally decided to start a forum bulletin board for my Cameron-Highland-Destination.com website. It’s been a long time coming. I may have the best content when compared against the other competing website of the same topic, only to lose out in the search engine ranking because of insufficient renewable content be it relevant or otherwise.

Of course I would have much preferred to build the phpbb bulletin board on the same domain itself, but unfortunately Site Build It!(SBI) does not offer the ability to host your own scripts. Don’t get me wrong. SBI is great with its many integrated tools like brainstorming tools to find the relevant SEO keywords related to your working knowledge of your website concept, plus a host of other tools like website builder, newsletters, etc which is really great! Good for first timer webmasters and people who prefer to concentrate on content than tinkering away at website code to come up with a smooth working website.

I have learned many things from using SBI, it is a great system, but it has its drawback. That’s the reason for my subsequent website I have decided to opt for a normal webhosting company like BlueHost. BlueHost with its build in scripts provided free in their hosting package for creating near instant website like Joomla, Mambo, Drupal, WordPress, and of course phpbb, for creating your own bulletin forum board, was a good choice for selecting it as a webhosting company. There were two choices of installation script in terms of bulletin forum: phpbb or SMF – that was included in the Fantastico De Luxe software services.

I wasn’t sure which one was the better system and after doing a little research between the two systems decided that phpbb was the better the one. Each has their own pro and cons. Phpbb was very popular, very easy to use but prone to security issues and web spammers. SMF or Simple Machine Forum was well, as the name implied, simple. The only way to know was of course to install them and see which was nicer to use. After giving each a quick spin, decided that phpbb was the better choice. It has a clean interface and a nice layout to the board. Aesthetics are just as important apart from usability when it comes to giving a user a good website experience. However SMF has one extra feature in that you could integrate with Joomla using just one MySQL database. I did that some time ago with my experimental Joomla page. Here do have a look at how to integrate SMF with Joomla 1.0: Joomla 1.0 + SMF using Joomla Bridge provided by JoomlaHacks.com.

You can be as inventive and complicated as you want as long as it does not make it difficult to update the files whenever there are latest updates available. It might just cause your website to crash and taking along with your entire precious database with it. Mind you, I may be technically incline but nowhere near the ability of many geniuses or talented programmers. That’s just what happen when not long after I have finally put up the phpbb forum and my first visitor was a web spammer promoting the usual adult sites and so forth. I decided to install a user shield mod into phpbb but turned out to be a disaster! And taking with it was my modified template and topic assignments. I tried to recover but it proved to be impossible and I decided to chuck it out the window and rebuild the forum from scratch again. Fortunately I haven’t started promoting the phpbb bulleting board just yet, and so have not lost any precious data.

Unless you really know what you are doing, it would be wise to steer clear of mod that goes deep into the PHP scripting code. I guess I’ll just have to do it the old fashion way of deleting spammer post manually. Hopefully it would not become too tedious an affair. Perhaps if I want to try any mod I could make another board just for testing purposes. Then again, it would still be a risky even if the test board went well with the evaluation but on later porting something just might break. Must be something about Murphy’s law…

After all the tweaking and hacking, my Cameron Highlands Community Forum Bulletin Board was finally up! Now I just have to promote it a little and wait for visitors to populate it. Wish me luck!