For the past three conferences, participants had been asking for forums to try to scheme rides and housing shares, and the past web designer was unwilling to build them. Now I know why — they are unwieldy and the out-of-the-box solutions are not exactly beautiful and they don’t always work how you want them to.

For a first attempt, I thought fuck forums they are so 2002. I’ll just install BUDDYPRESS AND WE’LL CREATE AN ENTIRE UNIVERSE IN THIS WEBSITE. After realising how non-agile and unachievable that was, I installed bbPress, the forum software that runs with BuddyPress. And this is how it looked, and all it did, note that 50 days had gone by without a use or a peep:

This bbPress forum did not work, so I went back to WordPress.org and began searching for an alternative, thinking perhaps that there were none at all. But, I found this, Mingle Forum, and downloaded and installed in in the /plugins folder on our WordPress site.

Upon first install, it was the default blue color that “all links are, so I went into the Forum’s Forums [meta!] and found out that the design treatment on a forum is called a skin, and downloaded the first red one I found. It kind of matches our site, enough that I am willing to go with it:

Lastly, these forums do not exist in a vaccuum, they are for people to use.

Here’s what I told the folks I was building them for:

And this is one of the replies I got, a typical example, reinforcing the process involved in creating interactive online spots: