THIS board account is free. The old webapps regular forums were free. They are free provided that there's enough traffic for the ads generated. Using AdBlock gets rid of them effectively for me, but anyone who doesn't have it sees them.
However, paid accounts, with special privileges, extras, and NO ads are charged according to traffic. For example, our old BLUE BOARD on the webapps forums would have cost me $500 a month to take it to a private board without ads, with 6 slots for "time outs", and a few other goodies.
Not only does THIS forum, or any other forum but ONE that I've checked out, NOT offer threaded posts, but it's as expensive, if not more, to take it private. There is virtually NO POINT for us to even think of that, given that all we'd really benefit from paying is "no ads" here.
The ONE forum that I looked at that DID offer threaded posts within individual forums was charged by the bandwidth used and how much storage was needed. Giving us a mere 2000 post limit before deleting posts and 10 gig of data was going to cost approximately $150 a month. We'd have used that up in a few DAYS, if that. So, I can only guess what it might cost to lease it to meet OUR needs here.
IF they'd offered the threaded forum for free, with ads, and some limits, then okay, I'd have gone with it, but they didn't.
NO ONE offers a threaded forum for anything remotely reasonable. We can get a threaded MESSAGE BOARD, and we have one, the link to it is at the bottom of these forums when your on the index page (or here http://mb.boardhost.com/CivilizedDiscussion/ but it offers very little else AND has serious limits to bandwidth and data use. That's what Ken C is going to, I believe, as he's built his new R&E on the same "message board" platform ours is on, but it will not be anywhere near as easily used as the current webapps board is.
We get SO MUCH more here within a forum, except for the threaded posts, which I DO miss too, but it also isn't costing us monthly. I used to run 2 forums using platforms similar to this years ago and later on, had trouble adjusting to the threaded format on webapps afterwards, but now, I am so used to the threaded that this style now seems hard when it didn't before. It's a matter of time to get used to it and knowledge of how to navigate it effectively so there is minimal wasted time doing so.
This forum, and almost every other one, including message boards, uses BBCode while webapps used HTML exclusively. So there's a learning curve there too.
That's why I created so many pinned posts on teaching folks how to use these forums to their best advantage as well as how to quickly find new posts and popular threads. I also made it sort by activity so it's easier to find the newest stuff that way too.
Trish aka Loresinger wrote: