A Place of Your Very Own

Forums. We love to hate them. Sure, we're members of somewhere around 18-20 of them, where we contribute, comment, flame, troll and generally act excessive. But if you've been banned from one to many and crave the power of the admin for yourself, then there is no other option than to make one of your very own.

There are many ways to do this. If you have your own server, you can simply download some free software and start making your own. For the purpose of this post I'm going to assume you don't, though, and start from the beginning.

There are a few great sites, but one of the all around nicest and easiest (for forums with lower population densities, at least) is myfreeforums. For the first step, simply head on over there. Fill out your information, then click the create forum button.

Congratulations! You just made your own forum. Easy, wasn't it. Now, just click on go to your forum and it will take you there. Now, you are admin of your own forum, the undisputed ruler of your realm, and... oh, it looks pretty crappy, doesn't it... okay, no worries, we can fix that up.

You will be, by default, logged in as admin with whatever password you selected. First, go ahead and go to the admin panel down towards the bottom of the page, as seen here:



Now, everything is here in front of you that will be explained better than I can in my post. But why would you want to read all of that boring jargon when you could listen to me. Go ahead and click on the left side of the screen, where it says forums, as here, then click on management.



Click up near the test category thing where it says edit, then type in whatever you want your first major category, or large group of posting areas, to be. Then start clicking add forums, and you can make the architecture of your forum to your liking. Just type in a brief description, a title, and leave the other fields and areas pretty much alone.

After that, click add new category to add wings to the new mansion of your forum. Once you're done building the basics, its time to start adding decoration.

A cool thing you can add to make the site have flavor is ranks. Go into the general tab, click on ranks, and then fill some out. Basically, when your users post a certain number of entries, then they'll be given a new rank, which appears under their name.

You can also go into the word censors, also under the same tab, to set up any censorship you desire. Now, I prefer a free flowing discussion, so I just used it to replace my friend's name with an insulting nickname. This is the power you can abuse as an admin.

You can also customize your smileys, adding a certain flair to your site. Just go into smileys under the general tab and scroll way down to the bottom and select import smiley pack. I personally like lotsofsmileys... it is so over the top.



To truely personalize your blog, you'll need a better template. Hit the styles tab, click add and then scroll down until you find a template preview you like. When you find one, click install. But you aren't quite done yet. Go back up to the general tab and go into configuration. Now scroll down until you see the default style option, here:



Now, set it to the style you selected in the last step. Then scroll all the way down and hit submit. Your blog should be changed.

Well, all for now. Let me know if you know of any cool forum sites other than what I mentioned, or any additional tricks to make your forum the coolest on the interwebs.