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Web Hosting
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Ideally, you should be able to moderate your board and remove rude or nasty posts. It's up to you what you want to tolerate in terms of flaming or bitching, but too much can reflect poorly on your page.
The leader in the free message board field is Inside The Web, which is where Jamie Maling's DOA Board is hosted, and where Steve Coy's last birthday card was temporarily set up. THE RIGHT STUFF's newly resurrected message board is hosted by UltraBoard, which charges a fee but offers you the option of creating topics within your board, monitoring site hit stats, etc.
A few of your choices:
INSIDE THE WEB- Excellent free message board site. You can customize your board to your heart's content, using your own images for the background, setting the font sizes and colors, etc. The only possible downside is that unmoderated boards have their messages deleted every 90 days, unless you opt for up to 999 days in the administration area. Moderated boards do not undergo message deletion.
TALK DUNGEON- Like INSIDE THE WEB, you can customize the appearance of your board and get free technical support if something malfunctions. A promising up and comer!!
BRAVENET- Bravenet offers an assortment of cool page add-ons, including a message board. The icons that appear on the board are cartoonish and a bit annoying, but you can have up to 100 messages up at a time and setup and maintenance are both really easy.
BOARDHOST- Very highly recommended!! You can store up to 250 messages at a time, and customize it to exactly match the colors of your homepage. Your board can contain a logo, and HTML-coded headers and footers.
CASUAL FORUMS- Cool free setup! Now offering the ability to customize your forum to display any language you want. Messages are searchable, and you can easily add your own LinkExchange banner, and Extreme Tracker. Everything on the whole forum is customizable, including the headers, fonts, and links!
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Message boards are superior to guestbooks in one respect- they encourage site visitors to not only leave feedback about your site, but also participate in ongoing discussions. Message boards are a BIG reason why fans continue to visit a particular site.