SMF Forum Misses the Cut
Even though I wasn’t certain how useful or popular a forum would be on my web site, I wanted to have one installed and ready to go just in case.
I choose the Simple Machines Forum (SMF) because at the time it was the only one that I knew of that would integrate with Wordpress. By integrate, I mean that if you registered so you could post a comment on the Wordpress part of the site, then you would automatically be registered to post on the forum also. Likewise, if you registered first on the forum, then you would also be automatically be registered to leave WP comments.
It would have been nice if it would also integrate by sharing the Wordpress menus and theme that I’m using, but that seems to be a tough trick no matter what forum you choose, unless you have some spare time and a very good knowledge of (X)HTML, CSS and PHP.
I also choose SMF because it seemed to be a popular choice, it’s free, and it has a large active community that is trying to improve it. It also didn’t hurt that I could install it with almost no effort using the Fantastico feature that my web host provides.
At first glance, SMF seemed like a good choice. But then I went to post a message where I wanted to include a link to another site. I found that the message posting and editing menu / process is way too complicated, especially for most of the users that this site is likely to attract. There is a help menu, but it took too many clicks to find and get to the help I wanted, and then it wasn’t that good.
I then noticed that my online user profile listed my email address so that it could easily be harvested by the bots operated by spammers, that constantly crawl the web looking for email addresses that they can harvest and abuse. There is an option for users to hide their address, but even though I’ve checked that box, it doesn’t seem to work.
So I went out looking again for other forums that would integrate easily with Wordpress and this time I found this great article about Integrating a Forum with Wordpress. It looks like I have quite a few other options to consider. I have some higher priorities right now, so it won’t happen right away, but you will see the SMF forum go away eventually and something else take its place.