Freeper Needs Help Setting-Up Secure Communications

McVey

[mcvey]

Freepers: I work at a university which is just about as left as you can get. Of course, in the People's Republic of Massachusetts, what do you expect?

But there are about twenty conservative faculty (most under "deep cover") and at least 100 conservative students. We have been meeting off-campus under a variety of guises, but if we go formal: 1.) the University will find some reason to deny us recognition; 2.) those conservative faculty members who are not tenured will be in trouble; 3.) the students who openly belong will not be flunked--but they will be denigrated. Until such time as we have the strength to come out in the open, we need some way to set up a chat room or list-serve or what-have-you to bring up problems, report the nutty things the lefty head-cases do, provide support and so forth. Everyone is very paranoid and, as the most visible conservative on campus, I understand why. So, we need to be able to communicate with each other, under screen names and I have to be able to monitor who is getting on the site since--well, the DUmmies raid us all the time, and I do not want to have to be guessing as to who is listening in and who is posting.

I am only moderately IT skilled, so any help you can give me would be appreciated.

Thanks,

McVey

[underground]

I agree with the advice of PHPBB and a shared webhost like dreamhost or bluehost. You don't have to be incredibly technically inclined to rent some server space and build a forum. Heck, dreamhost sets them up automatically through a script with a single click...even I can do it! Add in a dreamhost coupon and the total annual price after coupon is about $70.

Since you'd own the forum, you can set it up to only be visible to registered members, and you can set it so that new registrations have to be approved before they have any access.