Forums made easy
The best thing about Lefora is that there is nothing to download and nothing to setup. You just have to choose a forum name and we'll do the rest. You can have a fully functioning forum up and running in less than 30 seconds.
Lefora forums are free, with no limits on the amount of posts or members in your forum. You get 10GB of monthly bandwidth completely free. And as your forum grows, if you find you need more storage, we offer upgrade packages so that you can quickly add more storage. And you are free to start as many forums as you'd like, there's no restriction there either.
If you already have a website or a blog, embedding a Lefora forum is easy - you don't have to install anything! You can use a custom domain name in place of lefora.com on your forum. You also have full access to the CSS (custom style sheet) of your forum, so you can make changes to the layout, colors, and background images.
It's important that your forum is unique and that's why we give you tons of ways to customize your forum. You can choose from different themes, upload header and background images, use CSS to change the layout, and add flash widgets like chatboxes and music players. The more custom you make your community, the more your members can call it home.
Every Lefora forum comes with a sidebar that you the admin have full control over. You can put announcements and links at the top of this sidebar that is visible to your members on every page. You can also add widgets, like recent posts, top posters, and 3rd party flash widgets (like chatboxes and music players)
We believe in simple interfaces and making it easy for you to get your job done. That's why our admin panel is well organized and has notifications to remind you of things like pending friend requests and potential spam posts. You have full control of your forum and it's members in this easy-to-use, yet powerful, admin panel.
We hate spammers just as much as you do. That's why we've built out a sophisticated spam detection system that will automatically flag spammers. It works much the same way as your Hotmail or Gmail spam folder - you can even train it! We block tens of thousands of spam messages each day. As admins flag posts as spam, our system becomes even smarter - that's the power of the Lefora network that you won't find on other forum software. And if by chance, a piece of spam gets through, be sure to 'flag' it as spam and you'll teach our system for the next time.
Topic moderation tools, such as renaming, locking, moving, and flagging as spam are all right at your fingertips in a simple drop down at the top of each topic! And no more requests from your members to reset their passwords, we allow members to do that on their own and we automatically authenticate them with a validation email.
Also, be sure to take advantage of 'community moderating' which allows members of your forum to thumb up/down posts and flag inappropriate content quickly. Let your members share some of your moderation duties!
Lefora allows you to run a public or fully private forum. Private forums require admin approval in order to gain access. On public forums, you can choose if membership is required to post - and you can make it auto-approval or require admin review. You'll get a notification when somebody's waiting at your door and they'll get an email when they are granted access.
On lefora, you get free support from the Lefora staff and from an active admin community. Lefora provides admins with how-to tutorials, interviews with admins of large forums, and a very active support forum.
With over 90,000 forums, we make sure every forum has the latest security patches and upgrades to prevent hackers or viruses from getting to your forum. Security and uptime are a top priority at Lefora and we'll ensure your forum is protected, you just have to sit back and use your time to run your community - we'll keep the hackers out.
Lefora is in very active development. We add new features monthly. Because Lefora is on a hosted platform, you don't need to upgrade, new features are automatically pushed out to your forum. And if you run a forum with more than 200 members, you might just get invited to our Lefora 'Awesome Admins' program where you get a sneak-peak at new features before anybody else.
Lefora is one of the only forum software packages that has full support for third-party flash widgets and video (like myspace widgets). There are millions of flash widgets available that have been built for sites like myspace.com and blogs and you can quickly add them to your forum. These include chatrooms, music players, video games, calendars, and many more.
Lefora has stats build right into your admin panel, with charts to go along. You can quickly see how many visits your forum is getting and where they are coming from. We should you recent referrers and even what keywords people search to find your forum.
Do you run a professional forum? We have upgrade options for more storage space, ad removal, to remove the Lefora branding on the forum, and support for single sign-on with OpenID.
As an admin, you can send an email newsletter directly to the email inbox of your members. Newsletters can be used for special announcements, monthly updates, or just a way to remind everybody to come back and check the forum.
