I am just curious about forums such as this one. Is there a way to get or make one free? Or do you buy one for your site or what? If this is a stupid question sorry. Ok, well if you can help me figure out how to maybe get my own forum great! Thanks for your time people :D.
There are lots of free forum software packages available. Just do a search for bulletin board software on Google and also Sourceforge and you will get alot of hits.
SatoriGFX.
or just look at my disclaimer and find to link to the phpBB group 
It’s an excellent forum (obviously) and best of all,… free
The problem is another.
All these forums, albeith free, relies on a MySQL database for storing informations. And are in PHP.
Your provider will most probably grant a PHP enabled server for free, it is the standard now, but a MySQL server is another thing. My provider doesen’t give me a MySQL space for free, and most I know doesn’t either.
Furthermore disk space is an important issue. to have a forum you must have a big account, which is seldom for free.
Cheers
Stefano
This forum (mysql d-base) is currently taking up 5mb,… that’s for almost 500 registered members and more than 4000 posts.
So it’s not that big,… yet the load and bandwith are quite heavy.
I do believe there are some free forums out there which don’t rely on a mysql database, yet they store everything in files. These databases however are most likely to have less features etc.
Greets,
Timothy
Thanks people, I bookmarked that nice site and I’ll keep in mind the banwidth and all. I think I will check into how much banwidth I have on my site and make sure I don’t go over. Or I might see how much it costs to get a website with a larger amount so I can have a forum later on if my website gets any hits at all! Thanks everyone! :o