mmalmi@cc.hut.fi wrote:
How about Drupal’s forum functionality? Address: https://174.143.149.98/drupal/. The CMS in general looks better and simpler than TikiWiki. If the forum’s not good enough, then we can of course use a specialized forum software like phpBB.
Another issue I thought of with zetaboards: most free forum sites won’t let you export the user account database if you want to move. I don’t know why I don’t see any other software projects using a free forum, but I have to assume there might be a reason we would discover later.
If you can install phpBB3 on your VPS, that’s probably the better option.
From what I’ve seen on other forums, if the cost of bandwidth becomes an issue, a small Google Adwords (text links) at the top generates more than the cost of bandwidth even for very low value traffic like gaming. This would be much higher value traffic well targeted for high paying gold merchant keywords and VPN hosts. It could eventually be a valuable revenue stream you wouldn’t want to give away to some free site.
I want to pre-announce some of the features in version 0.2 on the forum and try to get some anticipation going. Even if hardly anyone else is posting, I have seen project forums where most of the posts are the author announcing what’s going on with the latest changes. Users can see progress going on, see that it’s improving and supported and not abandonware. It’s a little like a blog in that case, but easier for users to use it as a searchable FAQ and better organized. Whenever I google search software questions, most of the hits are forum posts.
Source: Published by Martti Malmi on GitHub in February 2024 as part of his testimony in the COPA v. Wright trial. The full correspondence archive is available at mmalmi.github.io/satoshi/.