I’ve already read up on the most popular forum softwares and am a little overwhelmed by everything that is available. I am seeking recommendations from people with actual hands-on experience using different forum platforms. No fights about “mine is better than yours” please.
I am the communications coordinator for a small membership group of around 400 members. Our past practice has been communicating via emails and that has become a mess. At our last meeting membership said they wanted something that works best on a PC for users or perhaps tablets. No stuff optimized for phones.
I will be choosing and implementing the solution to run on a spare late model server class PC via a business class internet connection that I already have. Nothing will run in “the cloud”.
We want to be able to have portions of the forum open to anyone read-only and most other parts restricted to membership. Not anyone will be able to create a membership. Only people part of our group with a validated email address in our files.
The whole thing needs to be pretty much plug-n-play to where an idiot (me) can set it up, but have features available for later expansion if/when we desire. No command line maintenence and strictly GUI/web interface control. We expect that there will never be more than 400-600 registered users. Oh, and no cost/low cost is highly desirable.