How hard is it to maintain this forum?

[CitricScion]

@rejectconvenience how did you set up this forum? I know you have IT experience, but I was wondering if setting up a phpBB forum was tough or not too hard? How would you rate it for someone who's never, like, set up a website or something?

[zonk]

I ran a myBB like a decade ago and it's pretty simple. Most annoying part is going to be keeping things up to date for security purposes, but it's a good first self hosting thing to get into. It's one of the first things I ever hosted.

[Crazyroostereye]

I ran a BB for testing purposes for a while, it might be a bit difficult setting up the web server with PHP for a complete Beginner. But It's something you can get the hang of in less than a week.

But if you want to go fancy/easier the trick is learning Containerization and Docker. It looks daunting in the beginning but when you get the hang of it, setting up any type of Software becomes a comparative ease. Also, Security Maintenance and Updating which @zonk Mentioned is easier with it too.

[rejectconvenience]

@rejectconvenience how did you set up this forum? I know you have IT experience, but I was wondering if setting up a phpBB forum was tough or not too hard? How would you rate it for someone who's never, like, set up a website or something?

So I went into it totally blind and it took me about a week. I still feel like I don't have the most amazing grasp on it, but I know how to do most things. I think my IT experience certainly helped a lot. If you've never set up a website, I'd say it's gonna be a little confusing. I didn't see many great tutorials out there, as.. well, it's not super common to want to make one of these lol. I'd encourage you to try if you want to do it, though!

As for actually maintaining, it's actually been really difficult to balance this, the Patreon, researching, writing, animating and handling community management for the YouTube thing, working a full time job that requires a lot of mental energy, and then handling things like the website, blog, and the forum. I mean, I'm sure it's obvious, the blog hasn't been updated in months, and the only reason I've been able to focus on the forum in the past week is because I got spooked that it would get me in trouble. I want to be able to pop in here every couple of days, but now that I've picked back up the YouTube process again, I can already tell it's getting harder to come back. It's why I added a few moderators, because I know I'm absent more than not, which I hope that I can change that if I can switch to YouTube full time. Replacing the full time job with YouTube would be amazing, because then the time I was spending doing YouTube in my free time I can replace with things like hanging out here or writing blog posts or whatever.

tl;dr: I had much more time when I made it, so it wasn't too bad to set up, but I have far less free time now, and now it's hard to maintain.

[CitricScion]

Thanks for the insight! It feels a little unattainable, but this might be the thing that spurs an interest in sys admin more than a website for me. A website is nice, but having an independent platform where you can connect with others is so compelling to me. I want to be able to set that up for myself or a community or something.

Besides being new to something like this, my own going worry is not knowing enough to not realize the forum I set up isn't secure or something. That's the biggest part that scares me. I don't want to run something poorly and then it gets hacked and now I'm part of something that hurts my users in specific area I care a lot about it.

[zonk]

I think the big thing to remember there is that you're not the author of the underlying software. So long as you do your part to make sure you don't install software with known vulnerabilities and then keep that up to date, you shouldn't hold yourself responsible if there's a compromise.

Search for vulnerabilities in software you intend to use, and recommend best practices to your users like using a unique password for your forum.

[CitricScion]

Thanks, that does make me feel better!