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Bravenet.com

- Star Review

Last Updated: 9/16/2008

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Bravenet.com Star Rating

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If you've visited message board forums on the Internet, you know that they're not all created equal. Some are user-friendly and easy to use, and others are a nightmare to read, let alone post on. And think of it from an administrator's point of view! If a site is hard for members to use, how must the people who have to manage it feel? If you want your own message forum, you want one that's easy and affordable. We set out to find a forum hosting service to meet those needs, and Bravenet.com was one of the sites we came across. Here's what we discovered about this popular forum resource...

What’s New?

IP Banning
Password Protection
Online Message Forum Demo

Our Favorite Feature:

We really liked Bravenet's online message forum demo. Rather than spending time signing up for the service and testing it, you can see exactly what Bravenet has to offer by visiting the quick online demo that gives you an inside look at the features this forum hosting service provides.

The Bravenet.com Experience:

Bravenet.com doesn't solely focus on forum hosting service. It provides a long list of web hosting tools and services to the public. Unfortunately, it seems that this site may fall into the "student of everything, master of nothing" category.

The forum hosting services were easy to use, but they were very basic. There's no spell check, no ability to rank your forum's members, no profile creation tools. In fact, there really didn't seem to be any advanced features offered, other than IP banning and spam protection.

Another problem with Bravenet forums is that the free version can be quite annoying. There are pop-ups and banners placed throughout your forum pages. The banners aren't so bad, but the pop-ups started getting to us.

You can remove them by paying the upgrade fee, but we really didn't like the fact that you have to pay double if you want the "Powered by Bravenet" wording removed as well. We feel an upgrade is an upgrade, and if someone is paying nearly $60 a year for forum hosting service, Bravenet should remove all advertising, including their own.

Overall Bravenet didn't do much to impress us. If you don't mind banners and annoying pop ups and want basic forum hosting for free, this site will be fine. If, however, you desire something more, you might want to look elsewhere.

Bravenet.com Features:

Free and paid forum hosting plans available.
Customizable design.
IP banning.
Emoticons.
Image uploading.
Statistic reports.

Bravenet.com Pricing:

The basic Bravenet.com forum hosting service is ad supported and free to use. If you want to remove advertisements from your message boards, the pricing is as follows:

Upgrade to professional (banner and pop-up free) for $6.95 per month or $54.95 per year.
Remove Bravenet branding for an additional $54.95.
As if the "remove branding fee" wasn't enough, Bravenet wants you to buy them a beer for either $1 or $3, but it's completely optional.

Bravenet.com Customer Service:

For a company that double charges for advertisement removal and wants their customers to buy them beer, they really don't offer very good support. Pro users do get access to instant chat, but free users are faced with waiting a day or two for an email response and no phone support is available. We definitely think Bravenet can use some improvement in this area.

Upside:

Easy to use, free forum hosting, integrated statistic reporting.

Downside:

Not as many features as we'd like to see.

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Bravenet.com Member Reviews

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