Free Remotely Hosted Message Boards / Forums / BBS

Free Remotely Hosted Message Boards / Forums / BBS HyperBoards HyperBoards is a free message board service with no advertisements, custom pages, templates, custom PM (private messages), friends list, integrated forum and member search, custom menus, skin editing, etc. Sudden Launch Sudden Launch provides free message boards with a subdomain (eg, yourname.suddenlaunch.com), unlimited boards, posts and threads, etc. InvisionFree Forum Hosting InvisionFree is an ad-supported forum host that provides limited customization of the board's features (you can change the colours and skin of your board). iboardplus Remote Message / Discussion Board iboardplus is a free remote message board that supports notification of instant messages, forum statistics, UBB code in posts, customizable profanity filters, various moderation features like banning a member, etc, the ability to allow or disallow guest posts, etc. The board is ad-supported. ProBoards.com Free Remotely Hosted Message Boards ProBoards gives your board its own subdomain name (yourname.proboards.com). It is customizable, supports various administrative and moderation options (allow or disallow guest posts, create member groups, ban members via IP or email address, email registered users, create private boards, etc), provides notification of instant messages, statistics, etc. World Crossing BBS Hosting This is a free hosted BBS system (ad-supported). It has public and private forums, chat rooms, personal email box for members, access via a web browser or a newsreader, customization of the forum, either a threaded forum or a linear forum, unlimited participants and messages, moderated forums, usage statistics, searching, sorting of messages, etc. Ezboard Free Forum Hosting You get an unlimited amount of forums, ability to ban users, have multiple moderators, customise the page appearance, search the board, have email notification when a topic receives a reply, etc. You can set different security levels for your Message Boards as well (administrators only, moderators only, anyone).

Free Mailing List and Email Newsletter Hosting

Free Mailing List and Email Newsletter Hosting Zinester - Mailing List Service Zinester provides a free ad-supported mailing list hosting service (in addition to their paid service) for announcement lists (ie, for newsletters and not for discussion lists). You can either create a new list or move an existing list. They provide you with the code for a web form which you can put on your website for your visitors to subscribe to your list. Your visitors can also subscribe and unsubscribe using email. They currently allow you to download your list of subscribers on a case by case basis, reviewed manually. You can post either HTML or plain text newsletters, as well as post your issues either through email or through their web interface. The free version restricts your messages to 300k in size, and does not allow you to customize your subscription confirmation messages, welcome messages, farewell messages, etc. Your MailingList Provider Free Mailing List Hosting People subscribe to your mailing list via a web form, the HTML code for which is supplied to you when you sign up with this mailing list host. Simply plug in the code into your web page and you're done. An unusual feature about them is that, at the time of this writing, they do not place any advertisements in your newsletters or messages, although they do put ads on the web page your visitor sees after he/she subscribes to your list. Other features include the facility to download your subscriber list (a fairly standard feature of all mailing list hosts). There is, however, no way for your visitors to subscribe by sending an email message the way it is possible with some other mailing list hosts nor is there a way for you to send your newsletters from your own email client (you have to do it from their website). You can only host announcement lists with this service. They allow importing of existing mailing lists into their system. Yahoo Groups (Free Hosted Mailing List) This free mailing list hosting service allows users to read the posts through individual email messages, on the web or in email digests. Your mailing list can be moderated or unmoderated, and is also searchable. It has numerous features including the ability for you to poll your group members as well as providing disk space for you to store files for your subscribers to download. This is useful for things like FAQs, etc. They allow you to import your existing mailing list (up to 100 names) into your new list without requiring your members to confirm their subscription again. You can check up our detailed review of this service in our article Coollist Free Mailing List Hosting With Coollist, you can create moderated and unmoderated discussion mailing lists. Your members will have to sign up via a web interface - there does not appear to be any way in which they can sign up via email as well.

Free Setup Utilities / Installers / Uninstallers

Free Setup Utilities / Installers / Uninstallers Spoon Installer Spoon Installer is an open source Windows setup utility released under the BSD licence. It creates a single compressed setup executable file for your applications. Nullsoft Install System (Scriptable) Nullsoft provides a free scriptable installer that you can use to package your applications. The installer only adds 20-40k of overhead to your distributable file. It can compress your files with zip or bzip2, register ActiveX controls (and deregister them as well), run another executable, call DLLs, create shortcuts, set registry entries, find windows that are open (for example, to detect whether an existing version of your application is currently running), flow control, etc. Inno Setup A Win16 and Win32 installer that can create self-extracting SETUP executables. It can also install an uninstaller for your application files. One nice feature about this program is that you can generate your distribution files from either a GUI IDE or from the command line (useful for those using makefiles to automate development). The Setup file created is extremely small. The program also supports disk-spanning, useful for all of you who have applications that span many floppy disks. Source code for the installer is available. Development is ongoing, and there is support for other languages. You may use the installer for both commercial and non-commercial programs, free of charge. GP-Install A Win32 installer that can create self-extracting SETUP programs. One useful feature of this installer is that you can actually extend its facilities by adding your own EXE or DLL extensions (to both the installer and uninstaller). It is able to self-register ActiveX and COM controls. It looks like it does not use any script files nor does it support the command line interface - you must use the supplied GUI configuration program. You may use the installer for both commercial and non-commercial programs, free of charge. GKSetup GKSetup can create self-extracting SETUP programs and has a built in uninstaller. There is a GUI IDE that allows you to easily create the Setup programs. Some downsides to this installer include: you can only use it with free programs; I tested an earlier version of this installer some time back and found that when setting up your program on the user's machine, information about GkSetup is displayed prominently in almost every screenful with information on how to download GkSetup. In fact screen space is sacrificed for this advertisement when displaying your application's README.TXT file, so that you virtually have to format your documentation 50 characters per line for it to appear correctly! HJ-Install This is a Win32 installer without an uninstaller. Documentation for the version I checked suggests that it cannot create self-extracting executables. Install Creator Install Creator is another Windows installer that you can distribute with your program. It creates a single distribution executable for your program that can handle things like creating icons and folders in the user's Start Menu, installation and deinstallation of DLLs, ActiveX controls, fonts, screen savers, etc. It comes with an uninstaller (deinstaller), etc. It claims that it only adds 60Kb to your program, which compares very favourably to many other installers. The free version may be used with commercial and non-commercial products, and includes an advertisement page after installing (but not with your program itself). QuickInstall A Win32 installer that allows you to add keys to the registry and supports more than one language. I have little other information about this installer. Sly Installer This is a Win32 setup program that is designed for people who burn their own CDROMs and want an installer for that CDROM. You edit your own setup script. There is no support for generating self-extracting SETUP files, nor is there an uninstaller.