Why don't you try to make one? No, I'm not being sarcastic. The reasons you don't want to try are most likely the same reasons why some non-techie people will not be able to.

It's not just about phpbb. My guess is the biggest stumbling block for most people would be domain management. It's hard to say for sure after being immersed in IT for so long. Also, the wast majority of non-tech people I know have no idea what PHPbb even is. So they would have to learn about its existence first.

Mind you, I'm talking about a forum you would own, so services like Proboards or Craigslist are out of scope of the discussion.

> Why don't you try to make one? No, I'm not being sarcastic. The reasons you don't want to try are most likely the same reasons why some non-techie people will not be able to.

Money, yeah. Well, there's no getting around that. Someone has to pay for that server. I don't see how the industry can optimize away the need to pay a fee for the hosting without becoming something like Facebook.

> My guess is the biggest stumbling block for most people would be domain management.

Well, yeah, but you've already mentioned that:

> The only essential pieces of information you need for a forum are universal name/id of some sort (e.g. a domain name),

I was wondering about the "everything else", what the made-up bullshit that the industry refuses to optimize was. I think web hosts that specialize in forum servers already integrate obtaining a domain from their own platform and even using a subdomain from one of their own, so I don't see what else they could do.

> Also, the wast majority of non-tech people I know have no idea what PHPbb even is. So they would have to learn about its existence first.

Me neither. I just saw it mentioned when I googled "forum hosting" and it seemed like the most popular forum software out there.

> Someone has to pay for that server.

True, but hosting is super cheap. Unless your forum is wildly popular, you can get a full, reliable host for about $5/mo. If it becomes wildly popular (but not Facebook-level popular), this would rise -- but you're not likely to need to pay more than $20/mo.

The way I look at it, interest rates are around 2.5%, so $5/month x 12 months divided by 0.025 is $2400 of capital you would need for $5 to be literally "nothing" to you.

By the same arithmetic, $20/month equates to $9,600.

So I think in a meaningful sense, your idea of "super cheap" is equivalent to "the price of a used car" if you look at the economic value of a monthly payment.

Wow, if you're computing costs like that, how can you justify buying coffee more than a couple times per year?

I think that shelling out $5/mo for what amounts to a hobby project is pretty darned cheap.

I buy retail hot coffee whenever I feel like it, which is more than a couple times per year, but nowhere near every day. Coffee is not a subscription, unless you buy one of those bottomless mugs or something. This is why I think the people who give financial advice to give up Starbucks and become a millionaire are missing the point, and I am not one of them.

You don't have to agree with the equivalency I'm drawing. I'm making the point that if someone shies away from $5/month, and it's not clear to you why, maybe they implicitly recognize the value of a subscription in the same way I do. Describing a different perspective is not saying I am right and you are wrong.

You don't need to convince me, but when people in general have 2 alternatives and one is free while the other requires a recurring fee of $5 per month, that's a big difference. How would you even explain to laymen the benefits of choosing the one that's not free when it's not even more convenient? To most people, it's paying money to complicate their lives and that doesn't make sense.

Also, $5 being super-cheap is relative. If I was really strapped for cash, $5 would pay for nearly a week's worth of food. Some people can't spare that.

> $5 being super-cheap is relative. If I was really strapped for cash, $5 would pay for nearly a week's worth of food. Some people can't spare that.

Absolutely true. I was not addressing the entire gamut of people, and my solution is certainly not good for everybody. But it's fair to say that $5/mo is a trivial amount of money for the vast majority of the population.

The true cost of resources to host a small forum are so low they're negligible. It's an obvious fact. Facebook doesn't pay $5/month for every discussion group they run. If they did, they would go bankrupt in an instant. Instead, they're making money.

>I think web hosts that specialize in forum servers already integrate obtaining a domain from their own platform and even using a subdomain from one of their own, so I don't see what else they could do.

So you're telling me that there are no ease of use improvements possible when it comes to hosting trivial content like forums. And yet you also admit that Facebook allows people to host trivial content much easier than doing it "on their own". This position makes absolutely no sense.

> Facebook doesn't pay $5/month for every discussion group they run.

Yeah, because they run their own highly efficient servers optimized for their own usecases. Of course your average joe can't run a forum for that cheap, that's the whole point of economies of scale.