* Forums made easy with Lefora
There are many reasons to start a forum. You might, for example, want to engage the attendees of a planned meeting to set the agenda or use a forum to support a project. Whatever the purpose there’s a lot of platforms for forums and one that I like because it is so easy to use is Lefora.
There are many reasons to start a forum. You might, for example, want to engage the attendees of a planned meeting to set the agenda or use a forum to support a project. Whatever the purpose there’s a lot of platforms for fora and one that I like because it is so easy to use is Lefora.
Launched in spring 2008 Lefora offers free, advertising supported, hosted forum services as well as a premium service ($15 per month) with adverts removed. For $5 per month Lefora will also support access to your forum under your own domain name.
Starting a forum is a simple process of selecting a name (all are identified as subdomains of lefora.com), selecting a theme, setting membership controls (you can enable membership required to post, membership required to view, and or automatic membership approval).
Beyond the basic customization you can also import newsfeeds; import content from other forum systems (e.g. PHPBB); add widgets (all widgets except those using JavaScript are supported), which includes support for running polls; include RSS feeds; and even create your own custom Cascading Style Sheet for your forum’s theme.
You can invite people to join by e-mail and as the administrator send out a message to all forum members and assign others to the admin role.
Forums can have multiple subcategories, a news page (really a forum activity report), and can include embedded video and images. There’s also support for internationalization.
Adding comments to a forum can be done with either a basic editor, or a more sophisticated WYSIWYYG editor that also allows for content uploading. There’s no support for e-mail submission.
An API is promised for this month, but not having an API available after eight months is surprising. There’s no detailed description of the API other than reports that it will allow administrators to add any widget to their forums.According to Lefora’s FAQ the company has plans to allow premium users to include their own advertising – the feature is currently in beta and charged at $20 per month.
Lefora’s current development plans are ambitious. So far Lefora has created a service that succeeds in being very easy to use, but I feel that the advertising is too intrusive, which could limit the interest of people who want to start forums but aren’t sure which platform to go with. Even so, Lefora is a service to watch.
