phpBB3 is the latest update to the phpBB series, incorporating a plethora of new features, speed, stability and security improvements, and is much easier to use than its predecessor, phpBB2.

Millions of people use phpBB on a daily basis, making it the most widely used opensource bulletin board system in the world. Whether you want to stay in touch with a small group of friends or are looking to set up a large multi-category board for a corporate website, phpBB has the features you need built in.

phpBB3 is a widely supported and highly customizable online bulletin board script, perfect for building an online community with your VERSION NEXT Hosting.

To begin building your phpBB online forum community today with an VERSION NEXT Hosting plan, click the order button below and follow our signup page!

Newer users will appreciate phpBB’s extensive administration panel, the most intricate features without having to edit code directly, while advanced users will value the ease with which phpBB can be integrated into existing systems.

phpBB3 introduces a huge range of new features to the phpBB series, including:

• Password protected forums
• Forum specific styles
• Redirect forums
• Subforums
• Forum rules
• An improved moderation control panel
• An enhanced administration panel
• Improved style/theme system
• Easy to use extensions
• Revamped default style
• Advanced caching features
• Advanced spam prevention features

And many more. It has also been brought up to date with the latest web standards, and is both faster and more secure. In total, phpBB3 adds 130 new features and many other improvements under the hood.

Below you can find a visual comparison of the default old phpBB2 and the new much improved phpBB3 installations.

When you create a forum, installing the script is the easy part. Attracting and retaining a strong, diverse, large community of users who post on a regular basis and are loyal to your board is usually a hard task to achieve. Many forums barely ever get off the ground due to a lack of knowledge on how to attract a userbase. This tutorial will show you a number of tips and techniques on how to create a successful, growing forum.

1. Make your content and topics interesting

   Users will sign up and post on your board if they find the existing content interesting, and consider it worthwhile to participate. Try and find a niche category to base your board on – something that hasn’t been covered before (or at least not extensively or succesfully). Establish a number of interesting categories within your forum, without going overboard; too many categories usually end up with half of them containing no posts. Post interesting and engaging content and get your friends to join in to kick start a good initial layer of attractive, interesting content. Post polls, contests and other interactive discussions to attract the user and then hook them in. Its usually a good idea to create an Introductions category, where new users can post about themselves and existing users can welcome them.

2. Make your board design as unique as possible

   There are thousands of forums on the internet, many of them with default, dull themes. Try to create one of your own, or if you have no design skills, purchase one. Additionally, most users will have seen the standard featureset of a forum before; try and add additional features to yours which will make it stand out. Many forum scripts have hundreds of freely available addons, for example, vBulletin, including social networking addons, live chat, shops and arcades. By using addons wisely, you can introduce incentives such as rewards and contests for your users. The more your forum stands out, the more likely the chance a user will sign up. Don’t go overboard though; a forum with hundreds of additional modifications can make it less user friendly and slow.

3. Ensure that the registration process is as simple as possible

   One of the biggest mistakes a forum administrator can make at first is making the registration process overly complex. For example, some forums make you agree to rules, answer security questions, validate your identity via email and await moderator approval. While all of these are good at stopping spam, if your signup process is long and tedious, many users will just give up. Try and achieve a good balance between security and ease of use.

4. Optimize your board for search engines with SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

   Your rankings in the search engines can be incredibly important when trying to attract new users. If done correctly, a good amount of SEO can result in users searching via Google for a topic and ending up viewing one of your threads. Most of the major forum scripts are fairly well geared for SEO as it is, but there are additional steps you can take, such as adding search engine friendly URLs, or in the case of vBulletin, adding vBSEO, a full suite of SEO enhancements and tweaks.

5. Put in as much of your own time as possible

   Don’t expect your forum to be successful automatically. The most successful forums are a direct result of incredibly hard work by their administrators. Be as active as possible (but don’t overdo it; the administrator constantly posting new threads makes your forum look like an inactive community, not an active one) Introduce new features, more incentives, thereby making your users feel like the community is progressing, rather than stagnating. Many forums fail due to lazy administrators, even if they have an active userbase.

6. Spread the word

   Many forums fail due to a lack of publicity; luckily, one of the best ways of attracting new members to your board is by word of mouth. Tell your friends to join, and if they find it interesting, they will tell their friends, who will tell their friends etc. This can tie in very well with a referral scheme, whereby users are rewarded for referring other users to the board. Word of mouth advertising, in tandem with other forms of advertising e.g. SEO optimization, Google Ads, link trading with other forums, can result in a powerful combination which will draw more and more users to your forums.

7. Don’t overmoderate

   A big mistake that many administrators make is to appoint an overly large team of forum moderators, who then proceed to use their new powers a little too frequently. Moderators who constantly edit/delete posts usually end up annoying users, which can make a bad reputation for your forums. Remember that freedom of discussion is what makes your board succesful; a large amount of moderation can cause problems. When you have a small userbase there is usually no need to appoint a moderation team; only when you have a medium to large userbase do you need to start adding moderators who can help with the day to day tasks of running a forum.

8. Introduce incentives for visitors to sign up
   
   Many forums implement a number of systems to encourage visitors to sign up and become members. The most basic of these is not allowing a visitor to view any thread content. This is a huge mistake; you are blocking new members from viewing the very content that is meant to interest them. A better system to implement is to allow visitors to view a certain number of threads, and then remind them that to cooperate in discussions they have to signup. This can sometimes tip a user over the edge into registering. Be careful to balance this though; a forum chock full of notices screaming at a visitor that they must sign up can have a negative impact.
9. Encourage your existing users to post
   
   Sometimes forums can have a substantial userbase, but 90% of them are inactive. There are ways you can kick start this inactive group; send out emails to them reminding them of their membership (careful; some users will interpret this as spam and get more annoyed than anything), or for some forum scripts addons are available which analyze a user’s activity and put messages at the top of the screen, encouraging them to post. The most important factor to consider is new content. If content isn’t being actively posted, more likely than not users won’t bother to post their own. Try to keep a steady amount of threads being posted to keep your community active and happy.
10. Have patience!

    Setting up a forum and maintaining it can be very difficult. But don’t give up; usually, if you put enough effort in, you will be rewarded. On the flipside, if you put in hours of work intitially and then stop, the forum will most likely die and you will have wasted your time. Try to constantly enhance and improve your forum; there is never nothing to do when you administrate a forum.

Many of the tips listed here can be achieved by the use of addons to your forum (specifically in this case, vBulletin). Many other forum scripts other a large collection of addons that can be added to your forum; browse around and find whats best for you.

Finally, after a long wait, phpBB3 has been released, and its relatively easy to upgrade your existing phpBB installation. phpBB3 introduces hundreds of new features and fixes, a completely new look and a flexible MOD system. This tutorial will show you how to upgrade your phpBB2 board, step by step.

It is also very important to backup your existing phpBB2 database.

If you have a particularly large database to convert, it is recommended that you perform the conversion on your computer, due to the conversion being a server intensive process. Instructions on how to do this are beyond the scope of this article. If you choose to perform the conversion online in a shared hosting environment, it is recommended that you perform the conversion late at night, so that server load is as low as possible.

Once you reach the end of the installation tutorial, do not delete the /install directory and login. Instead, click on the “proceed on to the converter” link. You will now be presented with the following screen:

Now click on the “Convert” link. You will be presented with the “Settings” page:

Fill out the form as follows:

• Database type: MySQL
• Database server hostname: localhost
• Database port: leave blank
• Database name: The name of your existing phpBB2 database
• Database user: The username attached to that database
• Database password: The password associated with that username
• Prefix: You can usually leave this as it is. However, if during a phpBB2 installation you specified a different table prefix, enter that here. You can check what table prefix you are using through phpMyAdmin.
• Board path: Here you need to enter the path to your phpBB2 installation, for example, if your phpBB3 installation is at /phpBB3 and your phpBB2 installation is at /phpBB2, you need to change “forums” to “phpBB2″
• Refresh page: Unless you want to do a test conversion to make sure you won’t run into any issues, you can leave this unchanged.

Double check the information you have filled in, and then click on “Proceed to next step”. If everything is correct, you should see a page telling you that the conversion details have been verified. If not, go back and check the details again. Once the details have been verified, click on “Begin conversion”. The next page will inform you of post-conversion checks that you need to perform; keep these in mind for when the conversion is complete. When you are ready, click “Continue conversion.”

The conversion will now proceed. A number of pages will be presented to you, detailing the conversion process. When it is complete, you will be presented with the following page:

You now need to login to the board and check that everything was transferred correctly. Check for things like smilies, avatars, and the general settings Additionally, rebuild your search index.

To do this, go to the Maintenance tab in the administration panel and click on “Search index” under the Database category. Click on “Delete index” under the Fulltext native heading, and then click on “Create index”. This will rebuild the search index and allow you to search again.

Once you have checked that everything transferred correctly, you can delete the /install directory and access your board.

phpBB2 already includes a spam prevention technology in its registration form called CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart). This prevents automated robots from registering on your forum. However, the feature can be made much stronger with a simple modification.

An example of CAPTCHA is shown below:

To install this modification, you must be using phpBB 2.0.22.

Upgrade your board immediately for security reasons if it is a lower version.

Follow these steps to install the Visual Confirmation modification:

1. Go to this webpage:

   Visual Confirmation Mod

   and click on “DOWNLOAD Visual Confirmation (CAPTCHA) 1.0.0″

2. Once the zip file is downloaded, extract it. Open the file MOD-visual_confirmation.txt and follow the instructions inside.
3. Once you have completed the installation process, log out of phpBB and go the registration page. The CAPTCHA image should now look something like this: