Technology bulletin board/chat/message board question

Wade Rivers · Mar 4, 2023

This community seems pretty tech savvy, so I hope it's ok I ask a question only distantly related to flyfishing. My fly club needs a free website to set up a private club-only bulletin board just like this one. We slog thru stupidly long email threads with acres of wasted text.

I've used Reddit, but the problem there is only the original poster can add photos. People who reply cannot add pics, so a discussion thread about "what are tying?" doesn't work well.

Anyone have a suggestion for a free site we can use and still post pics throughout the thread?

Thnx, WR

Divad · Mar 4, 2023

It feels a little odd, slightly cannibalistic but I am speaking for myself, not too sure if a fly fishing forum is distantly related to fly fishing as you said. Obviously there is enough food for all out there so the prior statement may be talk from my ars. Anyways onto the inquiry...

vBulletin and XenForo are the two leaders in forum platforms from my understanding. They are not free though, you have initial cost of $150-250, domain name purchasing at $10-20, and monthly hosting of $10. Do not try to host yourself unless you really know what you are doing and/or want forum members to get mad every time your power/internet flickers.

Free services are limited obviously and nonexistent for something like this site. Posting pics throughout a thread is storage heavy, just 10 threads with 10 photos each can easily be a gb of storage.

Edit: it would make sense planning from a constrained resource standpoint to not accept pictures past thread creation.