Nabble.com - Forums For Everyone

Want to make your own forum or message board? Looking for free hosting? Nabble offers free forum hosting and mailing list archiving. Its best feature is that you can fully customize the forum appearance (skin) to match your website. You can skin your forum to exactly match your site, with the same header, footer and navigation. Not only can you copy the header, footer, and navigation from your site into your forum, you can even run your own ads. There’re no fees whatsoever, no forced banner ads, no limit on how big or how busy your forum is and it allows free upload of pictures and files. There’s nothing to install and the setup is fast and easy. But Nabble also allows many types of forum-specific search. You can search across multiple forums or just a single forum, find posts by a single author and much more. You can narrow your search result by forum hierarchy and categories. You can find a list of forums whose name or description matches your search keyword and the matched forums are shown at the top of the search result. You can also narrow your search result by date or search messages by user.

“There are many vibrant discussions in forums, user groups, message boards, and mailing lists, so are problems such as cluttered UI, broken search, moderation, and cataloging. Nabble wants to be a place where your discussion can grow and be free of these problems. Let Nabble's experts do the work. Installed solutions are great for programmers, but do you really want to become sysadmin and worry about updates, backups and disaster recovery? Easily follow old conversations as Nabble archives are fully threaded and in full context. Just a few HTML commands integrate your Free Nabble Forum completely into your website. Creating a forum is just the first step. Now you need users. With Nabble, you instantly have access to thousands of users that visit our site every day. But that's not all, Nabble's sophisticated Search Engine Optimization (SEO) technology ensures that your Free Forum will rank highly in search engines like Google and Yahoo, so when users look for you, they'll find you. You get dependable, fast performance with Nabble. And you are assured that your valuable data is safe and secure.”

Nabble is simple and fast and absolutely free to the users. This includes the end users, mailing list owners, and webmasters. But Nabble’s potential success is banked on its offer of fully customizable forums. If you have a website, you only need one skin and that is your website. Canned skins never exactly match your site, and there is no way to insert your navigation into a canned skin. Moderating a forum is also a time consuming hassle. Nabble’s post rating and filtering allows you and your users to quickly and easily remove SPAM and unwanted posts.

What’s their business model? It isn’t clear how is Nabble going to make a profit from the site. Will Nabble emerge as real authority in forum hosting? Is the quality of the services really as good as described?