SITEPOWERDOWN [Author: Lum the Mad]
SitePowerUp, a popular provider of free message bases for many guilds and others in the MMO community, are closing as of Friday. According to Jim “Vor the Admin” Townshend,
I regret to inform you that SitePowerUP.com and its services will be shutting down permanently on June 1, 2001. The only exception to this is email. Users who have @sitepowerup.com accounts are welcome to keep them. Since 1997 we have provided services for over 50,000 web sites and have logged almost a half billion pageviews from our users. Those of you with paid service will be refunded a prorated percentage of your current payment after the first week of June.
As a service to those in the MMO community hit by this move, here are some providers of free message board services.
If you host your own web server, you can also set up your own message board. This has the advantage of not inflicting annoying pop-up ad banners and such on your users. However they can be a drain on your web server and require some (in some cases quite a bit of) knowledge in setting up web applications. Novices are recommended to start with Ultimate BB as that system has a simple step-by-step tutorial and works with almost every web server. In repeated (*sigh*) testing we’ve found that WWWThreads holds up the best under high-stress conditions.
- Ultimate BB ($249, requires Perl on web server)
- WWWThreads ($100, requires Perl or PHP and MySQL on web server)
- VBulletin ($85, requires PHP and MySQL on web server)
- Snitz Forums (free, requires NT web server and Access or MS-SQL)