Hey There..I haven't been here for a while as I have been overseas. I got back a month ago after 9 months abroad on a photo assignment.
The long and short of my question is: I have had an email group of professional and amateur photographers for two + years. We are a relatively small group but it is quite difficult to archive emails and photos this way. I want to put some kind of forum on my site. I have an idea to extend the forum to my local community in a short while. In the meantime, I want to set up a forum for my little group that is easily secure against spam and spiders, if that makes sense, for the forum. I have looked in Fantastico and looked, from there, at SMF. I do not want a BB as I don't like the format. I will be the admin and I am not well versed in mySQL or PhP. I have no clue as to the language of either and do not have the time to learn it. What ever I choose will need to be something akin to this forum with the ability for posting and ease of use for new members. SMF looks OK to me but I know that my lack of knowledge will be, initially, a problem. This is why I want to get a forum software that is fairly easy to start out with for me and my email group yet is expandable should I decide to put it out to my community.
I want to keep it as private as possible. Invitation only and dissemination through the local newspaper with an ad featuring the web address. I may be shooting at stars but wanted to ask here first. At the least, I need a direction. Anyone understand what I am looking for and have any ideas? It is too much info to spend my time looking through so many details of so much software. I need a starting point and this forum is a source for the most help I have ever come across. Oh, yeah, I paid my bill?
I should probably mention that I am now working from a Mac Pro Quad Xeon and have done no FTP or Uploads to my site yet. Any suggestions as to what I should use?
