I'm looking into setting up a forum for my apartment building. I want something easy to set up, maintain, and administer. Basically, I want a service to do the work for me. And I want it cheap. Grawk suggested freeforums.org, which looks good, but I seek some additional recommendations if you've got 'em. I guess I'd also be willing to pay a small (read very small) fee.

And now I'm thinking about vbulletin, which I know means some bucks. Are there good vbulletin-specific hosting services?

How big is the building and how much is the BB really likely to get used? We've just used Google Groups for our small neighborhood association.

phpBB is another free alternative: phpBB • Creating Communities Worldwide

Has good support as well.

Thanks guys, both good ideas. I've considered both, but I like the features of vbulletin. phbb still is an option, but I have issues with the interface. I just like vbulletin more. Seems much more robust. Like me.

SMF (the software this place ran until todd switched) is good, easy to run, and free as well...

I know dreamhost is reasonably cheap, and comes with phpbb as a free option. You'd have to do more work to install smf or vbulletin there.

Like Hopstretch, I wonder if a list-serve or Yahoo or Google Groups might better work out for a case like this?

Assuming your apartment building won't bring in 50bajillion hits a day, you can piggyback the server I have from 1&1 if want.

+1 for phpbb. thats what i used for back when i ran the website for my source team. very nice and simple to install.