What is ForumCommunity?
ForumCommunity.net and ForumFree.it are two hosting services managed by the same Italian company, one targeting worldwide users, and the second more targeting Italian websites. According to ForumFree.it author, the project was born the 26.06.2002, which is actually before InvisionFree (2003), and was based on the first beta of Invision Power Board (created in 2002), like ZetaBoards for example. In case you don't know, InvisionFree is the ancestor of IP.Board.
The integration is mostly assured by two developers: the main author and another very skillful programmer. This service is very popular in Italy, and their networks are in Top 10 of most visited sites, even if they do not have the same success in the rest of the world (80% Italian users).
For the purpose of our test, we reviewed the ForumCommunity.net service only, even if it is a bit less known than ForumFree.it. Anyway, both services are multilanguages, even if, by default, ForumCommunity is in English, while ForumFree speaks Italian.
It has a fully customized administration panel, totally separated from the board you are able to create.
Statistics of both websites are quite impressive:
ForumFree.it
- 7.148.830 Registered users
- 440.239.885 Posts
- 53.829.840 Topics
- 780.913 Forums/blogs
ForumCommunity.net
- 6.781.113 Registered users
- 305.444.338 Posts
- 43.819.117 Topics
- 488.637 Forums/blogs
Forum Creation and Hosting is free, and you can however decide to remove advertisements by paying a small contribution, follow this schema:
- 5€ for 3,000 unique visits for all users
- 15€ for 10000 unique visits for all users
- 30€ for 25.000 unique visits for all users
- 50€ for 50.000 unique visits for all users
- 100€ for 120.000 unique visits for all users.
According to Google Trends chart, ForumFree became more popular than their original competitor, InvisionFree, after 2006:
Google Trends InvisionFree vs ForumFree
Review Updates:
- February 9, 2011: First Review.