Homebrew Club Communications

mykafone · Nov 18, 2011

My homebrew club uses Yahoo Groups as a discussion forum for communication between club members. It works alright but several feel it is cumbersome, clunky and not very user friendly. Some have suggested facebook as the main means of communication but several disagree.

What do yall use to keep the communication open and easy between club members?

Surly · Nov 18, 2011

We use PHPBB. Works fine. I like the ability to store documents recall old threads etc. It is similar to this board.

Chrisl77 · Nov 18, 2011

sign up for one of the thousands of free hosting sites and setup phpbb on it like Surly said. phpbb is free and highly customizable.

Bobby_M · Nov 18, 2011

I really like joomla. Check out whalesbrewclub.com to see how I built our site without knowing hardly anything.

We have a ton of functionality behind the member login that you won't be able to see but here are some things it will do with completely free add-ins:

Discussion forum
User profiles
photo gallery
polls
etc..

The coolest thing about it is that you can make it look like normal website for external visitors and once you log in as a member, you get all this group communication stuff behind the scenes. We used to use yahoo for group coms and then had a really clunky html page for the public before this.

whatsleftofyou · Nov 18, 2011

If you just want a simple forum and don't want to mess with administrating phpbb yourself, sign up for an account on freeforums.org That's what we did and it works fine.

daksin · Nov 18, 2011

If you've got a bit of tech knowledge, I'll add a +1 to PHPBB. It's just so easy to use for everyone involved. It's basically what most forums like this one are based on. HBT is a PHPBB based forum.

biochemedic · Nov 18, 2011

What about Google+? A few friends and I use it to post random $h!t back and forth for laughs...could easily see this working for your purposes...sort of like facebook, but much easier to compartmentalize