Very Curious
 

I'm curious, what forum provider is this? Meaning what website was used to make these forums? Because it's kind of cool and I want to make a forum like this one with all these features. (Not copy this though, make something totally different!)

vBullentin is the software we used plus several plugins to create the forums. The theme comes from the official POTCO site and some talent from our staff. Most of the buttons and various images used to create the site were created by our staff just for our site.

vBulletin? Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks.
Ahh, I see what you did. You bought a domain, then downloaded/purchased vBulletin and added it :)
Thanks again, but I'm not gonna buy it yet lol

Yes, we had to pay to get a license from vB to continue using the software. It's only free for a limited time.

Cool, thanks. You can lock this if you want now.

I was curious about that to. I figured you had to pay for it with being charged for sigs and all that. Thanks for posting this Mac

It isnt vBulliten thats expensive its the server and back up server that can hurt your piggy bank ;)

LOL. Still, its expensive!

Gotta get a good server to meet the demands of your users and their activity. Get enough bandwidth to hold you over for the month. Buy some domain names. Pay for daily server backup, just never know and don't want to loose your whole site over something stupid. Pay for vB and some of the plugins we use. It all adds up pretty fast.

Since Nick has so many forum sites, we do get some discounts for some of the above. Google ads help a little, but you can't count on their 1-4 dollars a day to really hold you over. So yeah, this is why we require a donation in the form of extras to your accounts like sigs and extra PM space. It really does help when you are forking over hundreds of dollars a month to just stay online. Though we do our best to provide as free as possible site. We have it set up so those that can and willing can help us out with donation to keep us going. Those that can't help, don't have to.

Yea, and plus there are thousands of people that come to this site. You cant just get a free server, you would overload and crash it. Kinda like what happens to our guild site server when everyone is online...lol

If I may ask a question...its similar to this, but what is the chat thing there? All I know is that it uses Java, lol. Curious about that too

The "Chat" your referering to is IRC (Internet Relay Chat). The Java applet embedded into the site allows members to easily connect to the IRC network we use, and directly join the various IRC chat channels there that are associated with our site.

There are other ways of accessing the chat directly, however the option on the website (using Java as the IRC Client) is by far the easiest for most members to use. (Generally no configuration/setup or know how necessary)

Note: All IRC chat channels associated with POF, and our affiliate fansites are subject to the same policies/rules as the fansite for which they represent, and are regularly monitored.

So I take it that means I cant add it to our guild site? :(

I might be getting vBulletin soon :O