MiniBB

Forum scripts almost always look the same, have the same features and are usually rather bulky looking.  That is what MiniBB does right – it has none of those features.  It is a standalone, open source script for getting your own message boards up and running. It is simple and has a clean interface, but still has enough features to keep your community engaged.

Here are some of the features that MiniBB supports:

Security

• Protected members passwords
• Flood protection by the IP-address and time
• Your board may be securely opened even for guest posting! – with the special Captcha module protection on guest posting and new registrations.
• Special rules for guests and new users for posting external links on forum
• Safe auto-login when returning on forum in X hours
• Single super-admin account for better security
• Email verification on registration
• Full HTTP Secure (HTTPS) Compatibility

Members Profiles and related

• Unlimited amount of member accounts
• Forum-related statistics and graphs, based on the amount of posts for each user
• Member Photos
• Possibility to extend member profiles with any kind of custom fields
• Private Messaging and communication between forum members, with the optional Email notification when the new PM arrives; as well as “Reminders” feature (PM to yourself)
• Contacting members by email sent through the server

Search Engine Optimization

• Fully valid W3C XHTML 1.0 Transitional HTML, ultra-compact, printing-ready and indexing-friendly output
• SEO Friendly URLs
• Automatic Description META-tags for forum and topic pages
• Dynamic INDEX, FOLLOW (NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW) META-tags
• Automatic “nofollow” tag on external hyperlinks, and automatic “follow” tag on internal forum and website domain URLs
• RSS feed

Administrative Settings

• Creating and managing forum titles, descriptions, icons
• Assigning private, read-only or replies-only forums
• Protecting whole forum by a single password
• Banning users by IP/username or blocking user accounts
• IP tracking in messages (for administrative staff only)
• Members search (by email, username, activity etc.)

Chances are if your web host supports Softaculous – you can get this script installed in a single click.  Might ask your web host for more information on that.  If not, you can download the script for free from minibb.com. It is a very simple and lightweight forum script.

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