Hi I have a large close family and we live all over the world. Its
hard to keep everyone updated on our events.

We email eachother quite often, but it is becoming quite cumbersome.
For example I changed my email adress and it was quite a task to get
everyone to sending me emails to my new adress.

Anyway I did some research and found out about online message boards.
I dont have any experience with message boards. I was thinking we
could setup a family message board where everyone could have a central
place to meet and discuss.

so do you think a message board can help us?
do you think it is a good idea?

if so, the board that I like so far is  www.personalboards.com
Would the above be suitable to my needs. The criteria Im searching for
is that there must be no ads, fully hosted, must be affordable, and
easy to use/setup. I mean it looks good to me but since I have no
experience with message boards maybe Im missing something.

Just let me know what you think, no need for a totally detailed
answer.
Comments from others would be appreciated aswell.
Thank-you

I think this is a very clever idea. Just make sure that non-members
cannot read your family's messages. You don't want to sacrifice
privacy for convenience.

I recommend that you use http://communities.msn.com so you can have
security and also the ability to put up photoalbums and such.

Good luck!

tisme-ga

Greetings BlueDove:

Security *and* maturity were my main concerns when I noticed your
question.  The maturity issue for me would be a younger member giving
their password to a friend or even emailing it (in anger at a family
member) to an outside party.  I suggest that if you have this message
site, you ascertain that all communication is to be family only and
that NO ONE share their password with friends or allow friends to view
the site.  If you can't be certain of this, then you should have a
rule that no one discusses family/personal problems on the message
board.

Best regards,
    journalist-ga

I haven't shopped the market, but I know people who use
www.myfamily.com and are happy with it.

In keeping with the good advice from "journalist-ga" you might
consider a forum that will allow you to APPROVE posted messages before
anyone else reads them. This will keep someone from saying something
as a knee-jerk reaction or perhaps accidentally sending some
potentially hurtful gossip intended as a private message to the open
forum for everyone to read. The down side of this of course, is that
it might place you in the position of being the family referee, if the
situation arises, and can also preclude members from posting in "real
time".

tutuzdad-ga

PersonalBoards looks like it fits your criteria well. If you sign up,
they'll let you try it for five days without paying, and that should
give you enough time to have some other relatives check it out.

However, the other Researchers have raised some valid issues about
security, so I'm going to suggest an alternative. It doesn't meet your
criterion of being easy to set up, so I'm presenting this as a comment
rather than an official answer.

Find a computer geek you know to set up a phpBB bulletin board system
for you.  If you have a high-speed connection and a web host, it
shouldn't take more than hour for someone who has set up a phpBB
before. (I did one myself this past weekend and found it remarkably
easy.  I'm not even a geek.)  Once it's set up, it is very easy to
administer.  The nice thing about it is that you can set up different
levels of access.  The advantages of that 1) if someone should spread
a password around, it's easy to cut off that person's access, and 2)
you can set up different levels of access, and provide various
accesses to the different discussions.  It would be possible, for
example, to have discussions that children couldn't see, or ones that
certain people can see but not post to, and so on.  Like I said, once
it is set up it is quite easy to administer.

You'll find phpBB here:
http://www.phpbb.org

(It's possible that PersonalBoards has these same types of options,
but the web site isn't specific enough to let me know.)

One other option to consider is Blogger Pro, which goes for about the
same cost as PersonalBoards.  It would be much easier to set up but
wouldn't provide the security or flexibility of phpBB. You can try a
free version of Blogger to see how you like the system:

http://www.blogger.com

Best wishes,
Mvguy-ga