I'm seriously tempted to switch to Icyboards, for various reasons (3/3/3 without paying money is a good argument by itself...). Since it's not hugely famous and I never used it myself, however, I'd like to know what experiences others had with it. I read good things about it, but I also see they keep on updating a lot - which I'm sure it's great to fix bugs, but might be a problem if I'm relying on a plug-in and it suddenly becomes incompatible. Not so worried about basic skinning and coding because for what I can see it only takes some patience to learn. It's more about how reliable and stable the service is.
Actually, I've spoken to a few people that have used icyboards, and they actually violate TOU by allowing adult content without charging for a premium service. This is one reason I will never use Icyboards - I only do 18+ sites, and allowing adult content is still not allowed. They just don't bother you unless you get reported.
Barring extreme bad luck, nobody bans you unless reported. Icyboard says you can have adult content but you must keepbit hidden from guests. And I am not planning to write porn, but it's hard to play non-silly horror games without touching topics that are not for kids.
If you have an easy time learning new acp and skin set-ups I say go for it! It is all very shiny and new and fancy compared to several other free forum hosts and the ability to customize it if you know how is unmatched. But again, I will say there is a learning curve. My learning curve stretched a little long for me to really get what I would want out of icyboards because I don't have the time to invest just learning how to use it and I love more than anything to create custom skins for my sites. Maybe in the future I will dabble more with them but I am far too busy at the moment.
I've never actually looked into it and as I am still in the process of setting up a new board I may well do. 99% of my experience is with SMF and phpBB both on paid servers, but as I am almost maxed out with data on my server I need to go for a free host this time. I am trying Jcink at the moment but I am really struggling to come to terms with it.
Never rely on people not reporting you. Trust me, the roleplay community is vicious and extremely petty I spent time as staff on Jcink and 95% of all terms of service reports were from roleplayers. Most of them were over frivolous stuff. (One report that really stuck with me was one roleplayer reported another because their character shared a first name. That was it. No other similarities. They were both named Jim. That was it. Actually it was worse than that... one was Jim and the other went by James.) But there were also plenty of legitimate reports too. Sites did get closed down. I've said this in other places and I'll repeat it here. The ToS does say they don't allow mature content. So at the end of the day that is what matters. It's the rules you accept so you can use the service. They usually exist because money supplied through advertising requires things be kept PG-13. (Advertisers don't like mature content associated with their products.) Breaking the rules there gets advertisers riled up and they tend to pull funding when that happens. (And for those unaware, hosts like IcyBoards can be very expensive to operate... so they do rely on ad money to keep going.) Spork might say people can break the ToS, but remember that when things go sour (and they inevitably will) guess what will happen? If it comes down to closing his service due to not having enough money to pay bills or kicking off people who aren't following the terms... Don't be surprised when mature boards start getting the boot. As for experience with IcyBoards itself... It's pretty good. It's based off MyBB 1.8 with a few changes. Namely that you can't upload your own plugins and have to use ones vetted by Spork. (Which is a mixed bag... on the upside it means they work well, but the selection might be limited.) You also can't take your own backups whenever you want (without paying for premium). This I do consider a bit of a negative though. Otherwise if you've used MyBB 1.6 or 1.8 then you know pretty much what to expect.
