[CardinalX]

A friend of mine is looking to create a private forum for her online friends, and is looking for a good host/template (I know nothing about these things, so I don´t know what is required to create a forum), anybody know of some good forum software/servers? Needs to be accessible only to members, and allowing adult content.

[iFidget]

invision is the way to go. easy to customize and just great. invisionfree.com lets you get away with a lot too.

[CardinalX]

Thanks for the suggestion, I´m not sure if she can use that forumsoftware, as the TOS on their website says "no pornographic material". While she´s not looking to create an all-out porn forum, the concept of the forum is a place where she and her friends (most of which aren´t straight) can post general topics while also sharing their favorite hot pics and personal desires. And since not all of them have come out to their families and friends, they want the forum to be accessible to members only, with new members only being able to join once the moderator has allowed them access (so as to allow the closeted members to stay in the closet for now, and also to keep the forum free of jerks and bigots).

[iFidget]

me and five bi five hosted a board called joliesnippleforum on invision free before we purchased a domain for it. We got no complaints. if you change the forum permissions to members only then nothing at all will be able to be seen by any non members.

[Five bi Five]

invision is the best!  it's almost fully customizable and i think it is prettiest overall, which is the only thing i look for really haha.

i also doubt your forum would fall into the pornographic material category.  the one that i had with fidget here was definitely risque and we never got into any trouble.

[CardinalX]

[Five bi Five]

You can make it either way.  Since there were SOOO many spam accounts at one time we had it so you had to be approved by an administrator.

[CardinalX]

Well, sounds like this is just the kind of software she´s been looking for. Thanks a lot, I´ll forward the link to her, but let me know if you have other suggestions as well.

[iFidget]

if shes stuck on locking all the features down and making it a private safe haven be sure to let us know and we'll post some kind of tutorial for it to help out!

[Five bi Five]

We as in fidget.  HAHAH j/k yeah just drop us a line.

[CardinalX]

One more question; Some of the closeted members are concerned that their family or friends are going to catch them browsing a site with pics of naked girls plastered around, so is there a way to make the forum turn all pics into links, as a choice available to the individual members rather than something that´s enforced on all posts?

[iFidget]

hahah im pretty sure you can turn off the image code, even forum section by forum section (e.g. turning it off in the xbox section here but being able to post images everywhere else). but honestly just asking members to do that would be easier, especially since its gonna be a small bunch of friends.

[CardinalX]

Looks like I´ll have to take you up on your offer for a tutorial, that is, if it´s not too much trouble.

[CardinalX]

Right, after some hours of trial and error we seem to have gotten the basics down, but we´re still struggling to get the forum banners to appear at random (for the sake of variety), I´ve tried inputting various codes I´ve copied from online tutorials, but all I see at the top of the forum is a \"\"/" ?> can anybody tell me what to write to get the images in the designated folder to show?