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Questions regarding this forum

By Phil Tuttobene @philtut
    2021-01-16 12:36:16.223Z

    I have had an educational group for late stage cancer and Lyme patients on Facebook for about a year. The group is truly non-profit and designed to help people improve their quality of life and give them hope of new and unknown treatments that may extend their lives.

    Recent censorship of all conservatives on facebook has unexpectedly banned me from my own group. No explanation given so this made me start looking at starting a forum hosted on my own website which I have had for my biz for two decades. This takes the control and censorship away from any third party.

    Questions:

    1. FB is good for easy posting of articles found around the net, does this forum post articles with preview screens or just the link and is it easy or do I need to do everything in HTML?

    2. Many years ago I paid for PHP, before Farcebook became mainstream, I paid a one time fee for this forum software. Is this forum software truly free or will I be asked to pay something once I spend hundreds of hours adding content?

    3. Can I control membership with muting and banning of unwanted members (trolls)?

    4. If this forum software is truly free, how do the developers make money to keep it afloat? Ads? Nothing in this world is truly free.

    Thanks for the answers.

    Reply
    • 2 replies
    1. KajMagnus @KajMagnus2021-01-18 08:35:23.896Z

      facebook has unexpectedly banned me from my own group

      Is it ok if I ask if you got banned from all of Facebook? Meaning, your FB account got banned. Or you got removed from that particular group?

      Answers to the questions:

      1. Right now one cannot posts links. It's a planned feature. Currently, instead one types a topic title, and topic text. One can then include a link in the topic text — but Ty doesn't currently fetch any external images automatically, like FB or Reddit can do. Instead one would need to add a link oneself.

      2. The software is open source, so you can self host it for free (well, you'd need to rent a VPS somewhere).
        Otherwise, check out the Plans page here (it costs money; there're no free plans, and no ads. There's an "Almost Free" price plan though).

      3. Banning / suspending, yes. Muting, no (at least not currently).

      4. Software as a Service subscriptions.

      Reply
      1. In reply tophiltut⬆:
        KajMagnus @KajMagnus2021-01-18 09:03:29.883Z

        easy posting of articles found around the net, does this forum post articles with preview screens or just the link

        Actually it could take a year, before such features appears here in Talkyard. — There's also Reddit; if you create a subreddit, you'd get these article preview & submit-a-link features now directly.

        Reply
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