Hey, you can use Proboards . com, they dont look the best but are very easy to customise. However, you cannot show your adds or even use your own domain. Check out PHPBB and invision free to start with. I have not used either but have heard good things about both. Good luck DD
A popular forum needs to be hosted on your own, it consumes way too much bandwidth. Free acounts offer limited bandwidth and space.
If you are going to host your own free forum you MUST without a doubt use SMF. It is already at the standard of paid forums. Free forums that are hosted for you are pretty crap - if it becomes popular you might be in trouble as some of them have a limit to how many people can be online. Then if you need to use your own, I'm not sure how many problems you'll get with converting the database if you even can with some of these free services.
is there any one allow my adv?? i want to find away to make free forum on free host..nothing to pay??
As a free forum choice, I would say SMF also ... or phpbb3 but it's still in beta so not very reliable. As for hosting, if your intention is to make it a big one in time you really should try paid hosting. GoDaddy.com has hosting at 4$/month, and you can pay once every 2 months. Pretty cheap if the cash is a problem. Or i guess you could try free hosting to begin with and then switch to paid in time. You can find offers to host your website for free in exchange for forum posts in some places, and you can show your adsense ads alone in this case. The problem is that since they're free they're not very reliable and tend to go down from time to time. They do offer you however the option to point your DNS to the account you have with them, cpanel and a few other good options. You decide, but I'd say you should buy a domain and look for some cheap hosting if you want to make it good.
You can signup for a webhosting account using Cpanel interface and you will get free forum phpbb to install. It just stupid to not pay for a hosting account and a domain name. You only looking for problem, downtime and poor support.
my decide is free hosting ,free forum. how to deal with SMF??is it site give me free forum on free host or what??
A lot of forums are free. IF you want a forum to charge subscriptions you will have a hard time finding one. I am not talking about donaton Paypal links I mean pay straight away Anyway running a forum will be pretty time consuming and yo need to know some tech stuff to correct faults. I am selling mine actually