Forums for my site?

[brewerdudestore]

We're looking into the possibility of having forums on our site for our customers to create threads and discussions about beer and making beer (we're a homebrew store). Our competition has forums like this and we'd like to check if that's possible. Are there any solutions for this that aren't super expensive?

[Rick Wilson]

We use vBulletin for these Forums. It's not that expensive for support and I believe it's Open Source. It can be a bit of a pain to maintain and is definitely a common hack vector, so be careful with it.

[GDesigns]

I haven't personally set this up, yet, but you may also want to check out https://xenforo.com/ when you do your research. A couple of forums I participate in are using and recommending them. Have not looked into requirements.

[oliverands]

We use WordPress with the bbPress and BuddyPress modules to give us a blog, discussion forum, and rich user profile functionality. If you add a forum, you'll definitely want to make sure that you have a robust spam solution in place because you'll quickly be overrun with bots trying to create user profiles and leave web spam. Within the WordPress ecosystem, I've used several. We're currently using WP-Spam Shield, and it works brilliantly.