Best way to start a chat forum

[notnagging]

I've been thinking about this for a while but was told a concept like Facebook would be very expensive to design & run. I just want a basic rating type thing. I have no money!

Personally, I think the "chat forum" market is already well served, not sure how you plan to make money from it.
You could design a website on Wordpress fairly easily, it's a blog setup originally so should lend itself to chat.

Thank you inmyspare
Good idea

A lot of chat forum software is 100% free.

Do you have any more specifics please Dolomites?

Wordpress has some good free chat plugins such as Tal.ki which have Facebook/twitter login etc