Forget about Facebook for a moment, what's the best way to build community online?

I helped setup a social network at my work using Jive and its pretty cool.. easy to setup and configure.

I have a group or 2 on The Fridge It’s private, spam and troll free and works pretty smoothly for posting photos, wall messages, broadcast and private messages between members. It’s fairly young but it is adding new features constantly and the creators are very quick about personally responding to questions.

I used to belong to a couple of groups on Ning which has suddenly become much less popular now that it’s not free any more. But depending on the group, it might be worth paying for?

You could look for a site that hosts free PHPBB3 forums.
Why did people forget the forums???

@Zyx Mosyt forums, especially free ones, don’t have such great calendar functions, photo storage etc.

@downtide I just prefer smaller scale operations, and photo storage isn’t needed here. Calendar functions and the like are basically built into php, and there’s probably a million free scripts that would take care of all of this in combination with anything as simple as a forum.

Most blogging platforms provided all of the features you’re looking for. Just set it to private or invite only, and you now have a small community of readers, users and admins. Post photos for download, files and assets, commenting and feedback, etc.

WordPress and Blogger both have add-on’s and widgets that extend the functionality of the initial template.

I use blogging platforms for several things other than blogging itself.

WordPress, forums, youtube channel. There are many ways you can follow.