I agree with everything you've pointed out. However there's excellent forum software out there (that I've 'professionally' used before) with better bells and whistles than here that only costs $25 a month for 10k page views...$250 for 500k views. Not a threaded forum like here but a flat forum. Flat forums are great for one-on-one chats and image sharing etc; profile (i.e album pages) and linking to a vid.

So if yr not looking to get rich--its a few days work choosing/adjusting the templates; and tweaking some HTML and CSS. Don't need any investors to set it up. So if no-one shows up, or only one or two trickle in a day--its $25 per month on a month by month, or yearly basis. No long term contracts. The hassle would be having to check in around 3 separate times for at least 15 mins EVERY day to monitor the page counts and make sure everyone's behaving. If something strange happens like the site 'explodes' and page views run off the scale--then y simply charge a membership sub to cover the data costs and employment of mods to then do most of the 'work'.The annoying thing 99.9pc of forum software that I've seen doesn't have a membership payment option. The only one that does (the one I have used)...is PayPal only. Much easier using Stripe (which I use on another site which sells digital access to my 'book').

So that's the general idea...if I was tempted.

I agree with everything you've pointed out. However there's excellent forum software out there (that I've 'professionally' used before) with better bells and whistles than here that only costs $25 a month for 10k page views...$250 for 500k views. Not a threaded forum like here but a flat forum. Flat forums are great for one-on-one chats and image sharing etc; profile (i.e album pages) and linking to a vid.

So if yr not looking to get rich--its a few days work choosing/adjusting the templates; and tweaking some HTML and CSS. Don't need any investors to set it up. So if no-one shows up, or only one or two trickle in a day--its $25 per month. The hassle would be having to check in around 3 separate times for at least 15 mins EVERY day to monitor the page counts and make sure everyone's behaving. If something strange happens like the site 'explodes' and page views run off the scale--then y simply charge a membership sub to cover the data costs and employment of mods to then do most of the 'work'.The annoying thing 99.9pc of forum software that I've seen doesn't have a membership payment option. The only one that does (the one I have used)...is PayPal only. Much easier using Stripe (which I use on another site which sells digital access to my 'book').

So that's the general idea...if I was tempted.