Forums are all the craze these days, and with prewritten forum systems like MyBB and phpBB out there it’s not at all hard to start your own online forum in no time!   In this simple tutorial I will show you how you can make your very own online forum using the MyBB forum system, a collection on PHP scripts that, when uploaded to your web server, will make setting up and administering your forum easy!
Before we can start however, there is a basic set of requirements you need to meet before you will be able to start your journey along the long road to e-success, the are as follows, you must have:

• Some form of web-hosting, whether it be shared or your own (virtual) dedicated server with a LAMP stack, your web host will need PHP and the MySQL connection libraries for MyBB to work (obviously), but most, if not all payed hosts have this, don’t worry.
• A MySQL database, this is where the forum information will be stored (posts, threads, reputation.etc), you will need the database server, database name, user-name and password, and maybe even a port number, if they give it to you.
• A way of uploading to your server, in most cases you’ll need an FTP client to connect to your hosting providers FTP server, Filezilla is often a good choice, it’s free, open-source good stuff.

All right, that’s about it, now you can take your first step by checking out the MyBB download page, from here you are able to download the MyBB ZIP file, this ZIP file contains the assortment of files that you will later need to upload to your web-server to get your forum started, so go ahead and click the ‘Download Now’ button and the download should start, wait a few seconds for the download to finish and simply extract the ZIP file to a directory somewhere (desktop is okay) and open the ‘Upload’ folder, this folder contains the files that need to be uploaded to your web-server, keep this open as we will need it in our next step.
Next step is pushing the files back up to the cloud, more specifically, uploading them to our web-server so we can actually install MyBB, the exact method of doing this will differ depending on your web-host, chances are your web-host will give you some sort of FTP access to your web-space where you are able to upload/download/change the permissions of files.   If you are unsure about all of this simply ask your hosting provider, assuming you’re paying for your hosting I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to provide you with some FTP information.   I’m going to make the assumption that you have your FTP host, user-name and password handy, simply fire up your FTP client (see requirements) and upload the contents of ‘Upload’ to your web-server, your web-host may require you to upload them to a special directory like ‘public_html’ or something, if your hosting provider didn’t tell you about this then you should be able to safely just put the contents of the ‘Upload’ directory into the ‘root’ directory of your FTP account. For client-specific instructions on how to do this see your client’s documentation. This might take a while, depending on your connection speed.
Once the all-mighty first upload has finished, you should be able to access your beautiful new forum by going to the forum URL, you were probably given this when you signed up for your web-hosting (e.g. http://somethingforum.com/) or whatever, so lets try it out.   Oh what’s this? Internal Error? – Yeah that’s right, you still have more work to do, simply append ‘/install/’ (without quotes) to the end of the URL in your address bar to go to the MyBB installation wizard, which is easy enough and fairly straight forward, but I will guide you through it anyway, because I’m nice. .   You will be presented with the nicest of landing pages, telling you what you’re doing there and whatnot,  once you have read over the introduction page simply click ‘Next’ to get into the good stuff, you’ll also be presented with a license agreement that you can read through if you want, there’s nothing out of the ordinary there so you can just skip the headache and accept it.
Here we are at the MyBB requirements screen, this little script will test your server and see if it has what it takes to run the awesome MyBB forum system, if all goes well you will meet the requirements needed to continue your journey along setup road, but if for some reason the script detects that something is missing we will need to fix it. The solution to the problem depends on the problem itself, the single most common problem that people encounter is permissions issues, file and folder permissions are a painful, headache-inducing yet necessary feature of computers, and for one reason or another during your MyBB upload the permissions simply broke somewhere and we’ll need to fix this, the easiest way is just reading this MyBB wiki page that should give you some information about the whole permissions thing that I’m too lazy to do here, and hopefully some guidance as to what to do about your permissions problem.   If the unthinkable happens and Apache/PHP is missing an extension/module that MyBB requires to run you’ll need to contact your web-host and ask them to install it for you, if you’re on your own server see the Apache/PHP documentation for instructions on module installation.   When you’ve got everything fixed up you can continue…
Ahh database configuration, this is often where a lot of people get stuck, this is where we give MyBB the settings that are required for it to connect to your MySQL database and run.   You should have your MySQL database information handy (see requirements), if you don’t take a quick look-see at your hosting providers control panel and see if they’ve given you any information, if they haven’t a simple support ticket should give you some insight.   The database configuration screen is fairly straight forward (for me at least) and it should be for you, but if you’re having some problems I’ll guide you through it:

• Database Engine: This is the engine used to connect to your database (duh!), if MySQL improved is there go with it, if it isn’t plain old MySQL will do.
• Database Server Hostname: This is the hostname of your database server (once again, duh!), unless your host has told you otherwise your MySQL server is probably on the same box as your web server, if this is the case just enter ‘localhost’ (no quotes) and see if that works, if MyBB tells you that it can’t find a MySQL server contact your hosting provider for more information.
• Database Username: This is the user-name used to log-in to the MySQL server where your MyBB forum data is stored, this has nothing to do with your form account name or whatever, unless you have your own MySQL server your hosting provider has probably provided you with this information, check your hosting provider’s control panel for this information.
• Database Password: As with the database username, this was probably given to you by your hosting provider, check out the control panel for more information.
• Table Prefix: Unless you know about how MySQL works this won’t make much sense to you, you’ll want to change this from the default for security purposes, change it from mybb_ to haxxor_ or something because having a default table prefix makes SQL injection attacks a lot easier, change it!
• Table Encoding: Just don’t touch it, please.

You can just ‘Next’ the next few screens, they’re pretty much telling you that MyBB is populating your database with the ‘base’ MyBB data, everything should go well, if it doesn’t…Google it.
Now we are brought to the board configuration screen, this is where you tell the setup wizard some basic information about your forum, it’s even more straightforward then the last few screens, well…most of it anyway, I’ll guide you through it.

• Forum Name: This is dead simple, just give your forum a name, try and make it nice, grammatically correct and easy to look at, for example: I, and many others, wouldn’t join a forum called ‘xXxEl337__–__h4XX0RZ-__–___-pH0rUmZzZZzxXx‘, not only because any forum of the type is probably filled with script kiddies, but because the name is horrible and instantly proves that the administrator has no idea what they’re doing, because it’s just horrible for SEO, but whatever, you can settle with ‘Elite Hackers Forum’ I guess.
• Forum URL: In most cases you can just leave this as-is, if you change it you’ll have to move your files around and whatnot, so just leave it as-is.
• Website Name: This is useful for people who are making this forum as part of an existing site, for example if your ‘forum name’ was ‘ABC123 Forums’ and it’s part of your ‘ABC123′ site, you should set your site name to ‘ABC123′.
• Website URL: As with website name, this should point to your ‘main website’ (if you have one), for example if your forum was located at http://abc123.com/forums and your main website was located at http://abc123.com, you would type http:/abc213.com into this box.
• Cookie Domain: Don’t touch this, click the question mark if nothing is there.
• Cookie Path: Ditto.
• Contact Email: An email address that your forum users can contact you on, you probably don’t want to make it your private gmail or whatever, if your site gets much traffic you could have heaps of emails coming down the chute.

The next screen is again an extremely straight forward one, this is where you create your administrator account, (UID = 1), fill in the information here like you’d normally fill in a forum sign-up page.   Choose a secure password though, don’t want to make it easy for people to guess your credentials!

Huzzah! – You’ve Finished! Your MyBB forum is now all nice and set up for you, read over the page you are presented with, this gives you a few handy links to get you started with MyBB, Enjoy!