I made a poll about a forum on The Fool, a measly three people voted, but they all voted yes so I´ve been looking into some plugins or software that would work for us.

It looked to be a somewhat easy task at first. Just install a plugin and make it do it´s work. But looking closer it wasn´t really that appealing. So I had to search around for a bit.

I found 2 candidates

bbPress – from the creators of Wordpress themselves. The bad part I found with this application was that the e-mails could be easily drawn from the info page, which isn´t good.

SimpleForum – a plugin that installs itself and creates a page under the WP install so that it won´t look horrible in designways but keeps the width and most of the design. The bad part here is that the themes that exist do not look that appealing but I guess I will have to work around that for now.

For now the one that will be used on The Fool is the SimpleForum plugin. It´s quite easy to work with and I can remove it at will with ease as well. And the e-mail do not show up with this plugin which is a great bonus.

I will say this as well. This first days/weeks/months are a trial period. If the amount of spam is to high, there are no new posts, a lot of users register themselves but never post anything or just about anything that makes me feel irritated or I feel that it destroys the reason for forums and the forum is gone faster than someone can think.

That is a note and a warning. Thank you for your cooperation and understanding.

Otherwise, I welcome you all to the new feature on The Fool: A forum where we can talk about more things than the post themselves.

edit – The forum is gone. Reason? To much trouble with it. Links turned ugly as one example made the login screen send you to a attachment file. Forum page is now erased and everything should be ok

So for now we will have to live without a forum. Sorry for the inconvenience. Seems like I have to try bbPress after all but need to find some plugins for that first. The forums will get back online soon. I hope at least.