power-forums.com was a PHPBB3 free forum hosting service ca. 2006.
I had to shut it down for various reasons. In its peak it had roughly a million adsense impressions per month.
However the ad format of a forum isn’t exactly great. The focus is on text and you have potentially many posts per page.
Effectively those impressions translated to barely enough to pay the server rent.
But there were always some people who just couldn’t play by the rules.
There were porn and warez forums and I just couldn’t and also didn’t think it was something I should do, monitor every single post.
Many forums were abandoned and full of spam.
And the good ones eventually bought a copy of the database and moved off hosting their own forum, using the free service as a breeding ground, or test-bed.
The 2 most memorable ones were a guy from Poland having a poetry community. I think that’s really awesome. And then there was a community from Finland who grew goose.
Oh and a community by people who like “FKK” Freikörperkultur aka being naked.
The group from Finland was so heart warming. They thanked me for my help moving their data to their own location. I wish I knew if that community was still going.
And of course Pipa. A guy in south america trying to promote a lovely piece of land for tourists.
Anyhow, power-forums.com lives again, albeit a bit different.
Currently there’s only the English language, altough you can of course write in any language you like, as long as you don’t bring me trouble.
It’s more simplified. There are no categories, there are just posts and comments on posts and of course separate communities that hold posts and comments.
However all communities can be subscribed to and everyone can create an infinite number of communities.
The front page displays all posts from the last 14 days from all communities one owns or is subscribed to. If not logged in all posts from all communities are shown.
The semi-wysiwyg editor uses markdown, which is rendered as html and santitized on the server.
It’s a classic server side rendered website, but features some spam protection that is non-intrusive.
No captchas or anything of that sort.
It is written in Go and uses Postgresql as a data store.
Currently there are no image uploads.
So it’s a multi-community-community 😉