Pricing
Important: Specifications and pricing are subject to change without prior notice! No liability whatsoever is assumed for the completeness, correctness and timeliness of the homepage and the website, and technical changes, misprints and errors are reserved.
Each Forum.group gets its own dedicated phpBB Forum which we setup and administer for you. We handle the updates and setup of the forum so that your "Moderator" can concentrate of just running the forum - that is handling the membership and moderating the forum contents in a similar way to YahooGroups or Groups.io but with a wider set of features.
Migration Fees:
We can usually import the messages from your YahooGroups if you can provide us with the Yahoo MBox (messages.zip) download of your group or an Outlook PST archive of the messages. If your group has been since posting on another platform, it is often possible to add those posts to our migration as well. If you do not have a copy of your previous posts in Outlook, ask your members as we ususally find that one or more members use Outlook for their emails and have copies of the past archives.
Members can be imported if you can provide an Excel file with the complete members list. Please use the forms provided to upload your files or place them on a file sharing server (OneDrive, DropBox, etc.) where we can download them.
We make a one-time setup charge, irrespective of which hosting package you ask for. The charge is dependant on how many members and messages have to be imported. If for any reason, we are unable to migrate your data to our forum, that fee will of course be refunded. This service is still new and it may take some time to process your data, particually if we get a lot of requests at the same time. Each migration request will be processed in the order we receive them.
- We charge a one-time flatrate of $69 to setup a free hosting forum and you can have a premium flatrate forum with no ads and many more features for just an additional $90.
- If you want to add the members from your previous YahooGroup to the forum, you need to download the list from your YahooGroup according to our instructions and provide us with the excel or csv file. We will then add the members and send out login instructions to them for a charge of $40. This has to be done before December 15, 2020.
- Our minimum charge for migrating the messages from a YahooGroup is $40 for groups with up to 50,000 (50k) messages.
- Due to the complex nature of linking the original messages to the members, there is a surcharge of $30 when both members and messages are migrated.
- This means that migrating a typical group (Plan 4) with 5,000 members and 45,000 messages is 40+40+30 = $110 plus the forum setup fee of $69.
- Total cost will therefore be 40+40+30+69 = $179 and if you are based in the EU, 16% VAT will be charged as well.
- A special case is the archive forum (Plan 3). These are unsually inactive forums with important archives where the archives are put online with enhanced search capabilities.
- Premium forums have a number of additional features and cost an additional charge of $90 each year for an ad-free forum with enhanced features and posting via email.
Yearly Hosting Charges:
Free Hosting:
We can host your forum for free with advertising and minimal features. This is the simplest system and ideal for small groups that just want to chat with no thrills attached. You get the standard features of a phpBB forum plus the free features listed below. You have moderator control of the forum . It is not possible to have advertising removed from our free forums. Please note that there is a one-time setup fee of $69.
Premium Hosting for $90/year:
Our premium forums are fully featured with no advertising. This is the recommended option for groups with 1000 members of more, especially if you want extra features liked embedded vidoes, etc.
As a premium customer, we can make the imported messages available to the moderator in an email account, during the migration process, so that the moderator can have a chance to look through the archives and remove any unwanted spam messages, etc. and also add any posts that were made during 2020 when the Yahoo servers were no longer storing them. This allows the group's message archives to be complete without a gap in 2020.
Premium membership is available for a yearly charge of $90 and provides a lot of extra features, better editor and posting via email or online. You can add the Premium upgrade when you sign up.
Note: We reserve the right to add or remove features if their are technical reasons to do so (e.g. do not work correctly).
Pick the plan for your Group
There are two levels of Forums.Group - Free Hosting and the Premium level.
Note that if you are in Europe, you need to add VAT at 16% or at your local rate if you provide your VAT-ID number.
Outside the EU, there is no sales tax to pay.
For all Forums.Groups, there is a one time setup fee of $69 to cover our costs setting up and installing your forum.
The Free hosting level incurs no recurring costs as we put adverts on your forum to cover our running costs. Hosting is free forever although we reserve the right to remove dead forums with no messages for over 6 months unless it is an archived group (e.g. migrated to us specifiaclly to preserve it online for the future with Plan 3).
The Premium level has a lot more features and costs $90 yearly. This includes the setup fee so it is only $90 extra for a lot of extra features if you order it at the same time.
Free Hosting Plans
Premium Hosting Plans
NOTES:
- YahooGroup members are used to receiving and posting messages via email, yet forums are designed for posting on the website only. We are currently preparing a new feature to allow members to post via email that will incur an additional $30 fee to install on free hosting plans, yet will be included in premium plans. This feature should be available during December 2020.
- The Free hosting level uses advertising to cover the running costs. Hosting is free forever although we reserve the right to close dead forums that show no activity for over 6 months.
- Premium level forums can optionally activate advertising to help fund their yearly fee. Earnings made are tracked and collected towards the yearly fee.
Price List |  Setup Fees, etc. |  First Year Next Years | Upgrade Free to Premium |
1: New Forum: No Members, No Messages. For those starting a new forum with nothing to import. When ordering forum, use coupon code: nomigration | $69 | $90 p.a. | |
2: New Forum: With Members, No Messages. Importing members, but not any messages. Members are imported from YahooGroup, etc. When ordering forum, use coupon code: nomigration | $109 | Y1: $189 Y2: $90 | |
3. Archive Forum: With Messages, Files, Photos All messages are imported for enhanced online cross-referencing.For inactive groups to restore their online archives. | $119 +Migration | Y1: $189 +Migration Y2: $90 | |
4. Full Migration: With Members and Messages, etc. All members, messages, files and photos are imported. Members are linked to their posts where possible. Message migration costs are related to the number of messages your group has (See the table below). | $129 +Migration | $189 +Migration Y2: $90 | |
5. Full Migration service for self hosting If you want us to migrate your members and messages into a phpBB database for you to host yourself. Our responsibility ends when we give you the database. If you want us to install the forum on your webhosting for you, we can do that for an additional $79. | Database: $169 +Migration | Install on your host: $248 +Migration | n/a |
Message Migration Charges: Migration charges are added to the setup fees according to the number of posts to import. Example: Plan 4f (free hosting) with 45,000 members and 52,000 messages. The $129 includes members so we just need to add $50 to migrate the 52k messages: 129 + 50 = $179. Plan 4p (premium hosting) for the same group: 189 + 50 = $239 and in subsequent years, $159 p.a. | |||
Import YahooGroup Messages up to 50k | $40 | $40 | |
Import YahooGroup Messages 50k to 100k | $50 | $50 | |
Import YahooGroup Messages 100k to 150k | $60 | $60 | |
Import YahooGroup Messages 150k to 200k | $70 | $70 | |
Import YahooGroup Messages 200k to 250k | $80 | $80 | |
Import YahooGroup Messages 250k to 300k | $90 | $90 | |
Import YahooGroup Messages 300k or more | $100 | $100 | |
Options and Features: (subject to change) | Free Hosting | Premium | Updating after setup |
| Setup Catagories and Forums |  | | $5 |
| Setup Moderator (1 included) | | | $5 |
| Forum Banner Images (supplied 1500 and 700 pixels wide) | | | $10 |
| Forum Banner Images (stock images from pixabay) | | | $10 |
| Setup Digests | | | |
| Setup Board Rules (Standard) | | | |
| Setup Board Rules (user specific) | $15 | | $15 |
Host your domain (not including domain charges) | n/a | $20 p.a. | |
| Daily Backups | | | |
| Moderator Control Panel | | | |
| Admin Control Panel |  | | |
| Advertising on forum (covers hosting costs) | |  | |
| Private messages per user | 50 | 200 | |
| Forum Attachments quota included | 2 GB | 30 GB | |
Extensions and Features: (subject to change) | Free Hosting | Premium | Updating after setup |
| Add language package (US, UK, DE, ES & FR included) | $10 | | $15 |
| Add individual extension to free hosting plan (one-time) | from $20 | n/a | |
Receive and Post messages via Email (when available) | | | |
| Board Rules | | | |
| Email Digests | | | |
| Header Banner | | | |
SEO Metadata | | | |
| Stop Forum Spam | | | |
| Activation Justification | | | $20 |
| Google Translator | | | $20 |
| Media Embed Plug In | | | $20 |
| Pages | | | $20 |
| Precise Similar Topics | | | $20 |
| Recent Topics | | | $20 |
| Share On | | | $20 |
| Social Login | | | $20 |
Symbols | | | $20 |
Canceling your Group: | |||
| Closing down your forum (no refunds) | $0 | $0 | |
| Exporting your forum database for use elsewhere | $80 | $80 | |
* We should be able to restore existing YahooGroups from Yahoo MBox messages.zip files or Outlook archives.
If we are incapable of restoring a group for any reason, we will refund any fees paid to us in advance.
If we are incapable of restoring a group for any reason, we will refund any fees paid to us in advance.
Included Forum Features
Header Banner
Removes the content of the header replacing it with a banner of your choice that scales to the browser window. Undersized banners are centred on wide browser windows. The search (if enabled) can be placed on the header (top left/top right/bottom left/bottom right) moved to the NavBar or hidden.
- You can hide the existing header background colour, radius the corners of the banner, as well as set its maximum size.
- You can have a separate banner for mobile devices (<700px) if you wish
- The banner is linked to the url that the site_logo is linked to
Digests
Digests are emails sent to users periodically with summary of postings made on a phpBB forum for discrete time periods. Digests makes some phpBB forum users’ lives easier. They don’t have to explicitly visit the site to see what conversations are going on around there. They just read their digest and if there is some topic that seems of interest, they click on the topic link in their email program and start participating! They can unsubscribe at any time. By default, weekly digests are sent on Sundays. The users determines the hour they want to receive the digest. Whatever time they choose, they will always get the latest news so they can pick a time that suits their lifestyle.
Digests can be daily, weekly or monthly. Posts older than this will not be sent in a digest. In addition, if you want you can elect not to see posts since you last logged in, if you visited recently. You can even filter out your own posts.
If a user does not want summaries of every post, they can be selective. They can pick the forum or forums that interests them. By default they will get posts for all forums that they are allowed to access.
Digests can be sent as emails containing HTML or plain text. By default the user gets the entire post as text, but they can also select to see excerpts of each post or get a list of posts with links to each post.
Please note that each digest is unique, and may have different posts in it compared to another digest going out at the same hour. It may not be an appropriate digest solution for very large boards, very busy boards or for those who want to send bulk emails of all posts for a given time period, as it is designed for flexibility, not efficiency.
Board Rules
Features:
* Dedicated Rules page
* Create an unlimited number of rules and rule categories (optional)
* Multiple language support, create rule sets in each language
* BBCodes supported in rules
* Customisable anchors are displayed next to each rule, can be used for rule highlighting
* Rules page link in the header (optional)
* Require users acceptance of board rules prior to registration (optional)
* ACP panel interface for rule management
* BBCode editor with preview in ACP panel
* Easily sort rules by moving them up/down in ACP panel
* Notify users of board rules changes using the notification system
Stop Forum Spam
Will query the stop forum spam database on registration and posting (for guests only) and deny the post and or registration to go through if found.
Features:
- Will log an entry in the ACP if so set.
- Extension sends usernames, emails and IP addresses to a third party server. Via HTTP when adding and querying.
- Works with the Contact Admin Extension to disallow those trying to use the Contact Admin extension to submit.
- Ability to report a users post to Stop Forum Spam database with API key from within viewing a topic (admins and mods only). Can't report mods or admins.
- fix for username wild card issue (would return a false positive)
SEO Metadata
Add dynamically generated meta tags and microdata (Open Graph, Twitter Cards and JSON-LD) of your forums and topics to improve SEO of your board and show correct information when you share it though social networks, including (but not limited to) Facebook, Twitter and Vkontakte.
Features:
- Dynamically generated Open Graph, Twitter Cards meta tags and JSON-LD microdata from your board data and current page
- Set default image for Open Graph and JSON-LD
- Set how description will be generated
- ACP settings to enable/disable Open Graph, Twitter Cards and JSON-LD
- Support for attachments, for topic image
Premium Features
Recent Topics
Displays recently posted topics.
Features:
Adds a list of recent (or unread) topics to the index page.
Users can choose their own preferences to override ACP.
Can view all recent topics on a special page
Precise Similar Topics
Display a list of similar (related) topics at the bottom of the current topic's page. It matches keywords in the current topic's title with other topic titles in your board's forums and determines the most relevant and closely matched results. There are Admin Control Panel settings available to fine tune the display and performance of Precise Similar Topics.
Features:
- Displays a list of the most similar/relevant topics at the bottom of the current topic page.
- Similar topics are sorted in order by their relevance.
- Adjust how many Similar Topics to display per page.
- Adjust the age-span of topics to display (ie: display similar topics from the past year only).
- Enable or disable similar topics in each forum.
- Exclude specific forums from being searched for similar topics.
- Specify which forums can share similar topics with other forums.
- A query caching option reduces SQL overhead on large boards.
- Permission settings for users and groups determine who can view similar topics.
- Forum privacy is maintained, topics from unauthorized and password-protected forums will not be shown to users who should not see them.
- Multi-lingual support for stop-words (common words that are ignored).
- Multiple languages are supported. View the pre-installed localizations.
- Compatible with most styles, more added with every release.
Symbols
Adds a convenient means to insert common symbols and accented characters into posts and PMs, It adds a set of tabs to post/pm editing pages. The symbols tabs are added above the standard smilies table.
Media Embed Plug In
The Media Embed Plug In brings a modern feature to your board, allowing users to post links to media sites that appear directly in their posts as embedded videos and/or content. It supports over 50 popular sites including videos, music streams, tweets, products, articles and other embeddable content. Users can utilise the new [MEDIA] BBCode or simply post the URL in plain text. Older posts made before installation of this extension containing supported links will automatically display as embedded content too.
Social Login
Social Login allows your users to login and register with 30+ social networks. It increases your phpBB user registration rate by simplifying the registration process for new users and provides permission-based social data retrieved from the social network profiles.
Activation Justification
How do you know whether or not the person who has just signed up for your board signed up just to spam it? Letting people justify their activation can help you decide exactly who should be activated and who shouldn't be.
The extension is only active if user registration in the ACP is set to "By Admin".
Share On
Share On is an extension that allows users to share topics and posts in the following social networks:
- Facebook
- Twitter
- Digg
- Reddit
- Delicious
- VK
- Tuenti
- Tumblr
- Google+
- Whatsapp
Pages
Allows moderators to create custom static pages. With Pages you can add an unlimited number of new static pages to your board, such as an About Us page, News page, or even a simple forum Blog. The ACP's page editor allows you to create page content using BBCodes or HTML, making it possible to embed media from other sites and create truly unique pages.
Google Translator
Adds the Google Translator to the navbar of your forum. You can configure both the default board language and the translation language(s) in the ACP. The language codes must be separated by a, without any spaces.
