After doing extensive research we noticed these bots were able to get around our Google Analytics and Statcounter programs, thus the reason we didn’t notice them racking up hundreds of thousands of pageviews each day. All these spam bots spamming dead forums were taking up valuable server resources, operating completely hidden from our traffic stat programs, and causing legit forums to run slow during some hours.

Immediately we started working on a post level spam filter. While the details are confidential (we wouldn’t want the spammers to find out), this works by searching every incoming post and giving it a “spam rating” based on several signals we have. Forums and topics with a high spam rating will be flagged for manual review and we will be able to take action against those spammers in seconds. We expect to launch this new anti-spam system next week. Once completed, you will notice faster forums with even less downtime as we free up more resources for legit traffic.

We are very pleased to take our spam fighting to an unprecedented level. Spam is something that happens and no real way around it. What does matter is how your host handles it.

Recovery Console – Lose admin access? Need to restore from a previous backup? Want to unpark your domain? It can all be done here
Never Ending Storage – Your forum storage is always increasing, so you never have to worry about reaching our limit
Complex Live Traffic Stats – Sure some hosts have traffic stats, but not to the visitor level we do
Constant Upgrades – A lot of hosts promise “upgrades” but the fact is you would be lucky to get one upgrade a month. At FreeForums.org, we run on a two week development cycle so you are guaranteed to get exciting features every two weeks!
Forum Toolbars – We were the first to offer forum toolbars with our v2 service. Be on the lookout though because they’re coming back soon for phpBB3!
SigBars – The perfect way to advertise your forum, SigBars allow you to generate a dynamic signature bar with a picture of your forum as well as stats
Custom Portal – The iPortal was a huge innovation on the portal front, allowing people to easily create a portal to match their forum

These are just a few of ours firsts at FreeForums.org, and we’re pleased at how much of an impact we’ve had in the industry. Keep checking our news for more innovative features!

In the past five months we’ve increased active forums by over 50%.

In this same time we have increased active forum users  by over 65%.

For a network as large as FreeForums.org this is a huge increase, and a testament to our hard work making sure we have the best forum platform both for both admins and users. Due to our high emphasis on user experiences and attention to detail when designing our forum hosting platform, when you host with FreeForums.org you have a greater chance of success than anywhere else.

So what’s in store for the future? We already released a few forum promotion articles and have more on the way. We also have a ton of new features we will roll out this summer that will help you increase the activity on your forum.

MYTH 1: “You get what you pay for” and since freeforums.org is free it must suck.
FreeForums.org has a more secure and robust network than many paid hosts. It’s free because we choose to make money off advertising instead of charging the hundreds of dollars a year we could otherwise charge for our service. We have a large team focused exclusively on keeping your forum online and just have to need it, but if you’re still having doubts just ask our users!

MYTH 2: “The 99.9% uptime you promise is not accurate”
The 99.9% uptime we advertise refers to the uptime across our entire network, which includes webservers, database servers, backup servers, and more — as a whole. If a single server is temporarily offline, the rest of the FreeForums.org network remains online and unaffected, thus contributing to our overall uptime. Occasionally, there will be some slowness on a server if there is an abuser; however, we quickly find them and disable that forum.

MYTH 3: “Because we’re a hosted solution we doesn’t provide as much freedom”
The FF (Free Forum) System actually provides more freedom than a traditional phpBB. Our users often find it hard to go back to a traditional phpBB install because they lose all the features we have.

MYTH 4: “Moving from phpBB2 to phpBB3 was a mistake, I liked v2 better”
Like anything new, it takes awhile before you’re as good with phpBB3 as you were with phpBB2. Having said that, almost all users have grown to love phpBB3 and could never go back. If that weren’t a good enough reason for phpBB3 to be on top, phpBB2 suffers from security issues that won’t be fixed since it’s no longer supported. The bottom line is phpBB2 is like Windows 98 — while it was good at the time we have since moved on to better.

MYTH5: “FreeForums.org is basic and doesn’t have any “Advanced” features”
FreeForums.org offers more features than any other host on the market. We constantly hear how much people love all the features and mods we provide them. In addition, we also offer the most upgrades out of any forum host. With our paid upgrades you can add tons of features and mods to your already advanced forum.

I hope this cleared up some confusions among new members. If you have any questions please let us know!