Decent free forum hosting?

Anyone know where I might find one that you have a personal good experience with?

A few of us want to pull a small community of 3d modellers together.

My searches have revealed a whole bunch that all look basically the same, hence asking about personal good experiences. I want something reliable as we only want to set this thing up once.

http://www.forumer.com/

Agreed. Forumer is good.

Proboards is quite good.
http://www.proboards.com/

try www.simplemachines.org. Has to be one of the best imo.

I'm looking them all over as we go along, some interesting places there. Thanks very much for the links so far.

Another that I found is this http://www.phpbbserver.com/

Can anyone spot the catch? It looks pretty good, but I can't see any gotchas so far. That's quite unusual in itself. (which worries me a bit! ;O)

I'm not completely certain what I should be looking out for most of all as I'm new to it and no one else volunteered to find us a home! ;O) I've been a sysop in my time, but this a whole new ball game, or at least it seems to be.

Simplemachines provide the forum software. AFAIK they do not provide any hosting solutions, free or otherwise.

I would recommend paid-for hosting, but you may find that free hosting provides everything you need.

I've just this minute found out we won't be needing it after all. I do wish people would communicate sometimes! ;O)

Thank you all for your help. I shall not offer to help this other lot further. I've wasted a whole day of mine and fair chunk of yours without knowing it of course.

Can't feel great about that bit. Looking for an upside, I learned some great things today though! ;O)

Have you considered starting a forum? :-P

LOL! @ xlsior ;O) (Square on the funny bone!)

I used

http://invisionfree.com/

For my site's forum... seems to blend in well and gave me enough to customise... more than I actually DID customise...

www.dampes8n.com click F for forum to see it...

I would recommend not using any 3rd party forum host and instead get your own webspace.

The advantages to this are no adverts, faster forum responsiveness and less downtime.

If you go for this option I would not recommend phpBB as automated forum-spamming for casino's and Russian child pron is now commonplace on many phpBB installations.

Faster forum responsiveness depends very largely on your choice of host. If you go for one of these "100MB webspace UNLIMITED BANDWIDTH!!! only £1.00 a MONTH!!" type of hosts, you're not going to get very good responsiveness.

1&1 do good shared hosting plans and are actually quite reasonable, but you can't use their cheapest option because it comes without MySQL (required for most any type of forum software).

My site/blog is hosted through http://www.zenwebhosting.co.uk/ and is exceedingly well connected and the server doesn't slow down (not yet anyway). Support is good as well.

So long as your free host will let you backup your forum database to a downloadable file, you shan't go far wrong.