Website/wiki/hosting/etc

[Lotherio]

No clue where to really put this, but thought this was a good place to look.

Wiki is a pretty common way to put up a game's website, easy for players to add their own pages, easy to collect logs. Wikidot seems to be getting popular too lately.

Now ... I'm a cheap bastard who doesn't want to pay to have ads removed however, so am looking for options along the lines of free, with controlled membership on who can join and post. I can find free wiki/farm hosting easy enough, but they seem to allow all members to post, not just specific to the stie. I've seen people use things like wordpress before too.

Just curious what options are out there that I haven't considered and that would be user friendly enough? Thanks all.

[Three-Eyed Crow]

You do setup stuff to control who can post and who can't as a site manager with all these options (though I'm most familiar with Wikidot as a site manager and Mediawiki only as a user). Pretty much every one I've looked as has options to lock posting to site members, and let the site admin control how people join. I guess I'm not sure what you mean when you say, "they seem to allow all members to post."

[Lotherio]

I'm very familiar with wiki and wikidot. Just curious if there are free options out there cause of the 'cheap bastard' part.

I don't mind setting up a wiki with ads on it either, just pondering something cleaner.

[Sunny]

I do not believe there is a free, ad-free site out there where you can put up a website of any sort. These things cost money to run and host, so what you're essentially asking for is for someone to pay money to host a site for your game.

Your best bet in this case is to see if you have any friends that host that are willing to do you the favor.

[Bobotron]

It depends on what you want.

You can always find some cheap free hosting and use their stuff; I've seen many in weird places that come with things similar to a cPanel. You get a server and you can install stuff via FTP or stuff like Installatron. Most free hosting is going to limit you to things like subdomain.domain.ext, and

A local LARP uses wix.com, which I think is free. Their site is pretty (http://lexgaming.wix.com/kindredvoodoo), and it doesn't seem too difficult (I think they have customizable templates)

I have my LARP and MUSH wikis hosted through skynethosting.net; I have had 99.9% uptime (I think the most I was down was about 2 hours during a moron's DDoS attack), I get good FTP access and shell access, the server is a good speed, it has true cPanel and things like Softaculous (which you can one-click install the latest Mediawiki or Wordpress, for example). I play like $12/6 months due to a recurring discount, and get 2 gigs (more than enough right now) and 100gigs of bandwidth.

This site you might try, http://mwzip.com/mediawikihosting.htm, it has a free mediawiki basic level (very few extensions, but enough to use), and a $5 setup/free after that pro version that lets you install extensions and you have full FTP/SSH access. You can also use your own domain (I recommend namecheap.com for that; I have my two domains registered through them).

[JustNobody]

I really love http://www.shoutwiki.com/wiki/Main_Page . Might be not perfect, but it always gives everything, what I need:)

[Arkandel]

@JustNobody said:

Might be not perfect, but it always gives everything

Man you are hard to please!

[Lotherio]

Thanks for the replies, if I decide to pay a little, I might try skynethosting.net. I was considering biting the bullet to remove ads on wikidot alone, but that seems like a better deal if I can get the recurring discount.

That one sounds attractive for that price.