Muut Reviews 2

I used Muut starting in 2020 as recommended by Memberspace at the time. I left in 2021 but it was almost impossible to end my paid membership because there seemed to be no admin. I honestly don't remember how I finally ended the charges but was glad to be done. It didn't make my community engaged at all and there were time I missed private messages for months. It looks like in 2022 they have made some upgrades...not sure as I only just revisited the sales page. But this was not the community building forum for me.

You can't argue that Muut.com doesn't offer pretty looking forums, however with a free account there is zero administrative control over the forum. In terms of cost, the minimum account pricing is $16 per month, which for a forum is just not good value, especially if you are not a company.

You cannot delete a forum if you are finished with it, Muut's standpoint being "The liberty to delete communities arbitrarily could easily be abused" and they do not even make deleting your account easy as there is no option to this other than contacting them and if you do delete your account, the forum remains but under anonymous ownership. They do follow with "However, if you'd like to remove all your communities and data permanently, this can be accomplished by a complete account deletion. Please contact us for more information on deleting your account." but if it is possible, then it should be made easier, I fail to see in what possible way abuse could occur.

So what's the big deal with administrative control? Well, spam for one, there is no way of deleting it and you cannot eject users who put said spam up.

Unfortunately if anybody asks me these days if I can recommend a forum, I tell them to avoid Muut. You could argue that if they give administrative control with a free account, there is nothing in it for them, though you could argue that for anything that is offered for free, but happy consumers will promote services which are free and in some cases this could lead people they have promoted to buying a paid for service, which I am sure is the attitude behind most free services online.

If you have any kind of web hosting, I recommend PhpBB instead, yes you need to be a little bit more techical to set it up, however it is open source and completely free with full control. It is not without problems, if you don't tweak settings, especially in terms of security, but you do have the control to tweak those settings.

I wish I had better things to say about Muut as I hate down rating something that is free, however even free should not detract from a certain level of quality.