How to Build Your Own Community Forum with No Technical Skills Using WebsiteToolBox | Review

Website Tool Box Forum - FREE 14 DAY TRIAL

Alot of people say forums are a thing of the past and that Social Media as well as Q&A sites like Quora have made them irrelevent. Personally I love forums. Do you use them? If so what some of your favorite forums? Drop a comment below and tell us about your experience with forums.

I was looking at potentially building a forum to kind of this RulesForRebels Community, a place we could meetup and talk about topics, ask each other for assistance, help others, etc.

I'm not super tech saavy so I was looking for a simple cloud based option. Now a lot of people will tell you paying someone to host a forum is a waste of money, there are plenty of free open source forum options out there that are free to use and all you have to pay is like $3.95 per month for hosting.

While that's true, if you are the type of person who finds Wordpress challenging, you will probably find creating a forum fairly challenging as well. While setting up a sinple PHPBB forum may not be too hard, if you want to monetize it with ads, customize featuers, or have gated categories people have to pay for you need to start using plugins, doing custom coding, and it can get kind of complicated.

The same way most people use a simple easy to use Store like Shopify as opposed to something like a Wordpress Woocommerce site, I was looking for an easy to use dumbed down cloud hosted form software.

There isn't a ton of information online about what the options are, however after doing a lot of research I basically nailed it down to WEbsiteToolBox which your seeing in this video, as well as Plush Forums, Vanilla Forums, and VBulletin hosted forums. VBulletin and Vanilla both cost between $300 and $500 so they were out of the running right off the bat.

When I started looking for reviews of Plush and WebsiteToolBox there wasn't much online which is kind of why I'm making this video so you can see a backend look at the software, how it works and kind of get my review of it.

I decided to start with WebsiteToolBox and chose it over Plush because it's a more traditional forum look and layout. I also liked a lot of the features they offered. Both Plush and WebsiteToolBox allow you to monetize the forum with ads as well as make the entire forum or certain sections members only and people have to pay a monthly, yearly or one time fee to access those sections.

I only started using this yesterday, however I've had a chance to for the most part set things up and use it, and while I don't have any members to where I can comment on how it functions for users, i will say it was very easy to setup for the most part, and the support has been pretty good. They offer a LiveChat as well as have an 800 number you can call which is more than we can say about a lot of companies these days. I've used both the phone support and live chat and they were very helpful.

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