Page 2 - what are your experience with starting a forum?

I agree, starting a forum is not easy. It took us about a year to get our forums off the ground, and 3 years to really get is moving with members posting all the time, like we do here on SEOChat.

As noted in the other post. Don't make your forums big, start with 3-5 forum areas, then as a topic keeps showing up, add them. You will also find users that will ask for new forums or services. Don't add them just because they ask for it, wait till you see that you need it.

Its very hard to get users to post, you have to have a theme and a community feel where they feel like they are wanted, if they feel left out they will move on.

If you can get friends to come and post, more power to you! If you are like me and you can count your friends on one hand then you better start spawning personalities until the board starts getting regular posters. Other ways to get it moving is to offer contest. People love to get free stuff! Give away mouse pads, T-shirts, etc for guessing something you ask or making so many post.

When people come to me asking about starting a forum I tell them they better have a site that has at minimum of 3k unique visitors a day, but they really should have around 10k a day to get it rolling. Starting from scratch is a hard way to start a forum, but it can be done as I did it.

ALWAYS lookout for the poster that is acting like a user but is pushing something else, or looking to start BS!

Forums are like fine wine, its takes time and much care to make it good!

Thanks for the info kbf - particularly the two points I've quoted above!

I'd like to know what the Googlebot mod is, I think I could use that one Is it the long list of "search engine friendly" mods? I tried that and, while other people seem to have made it all work, it didn't for me I tried it again and, well it still didn't do its thing - I think it was the url rewrite stuff - it changed the utl for the loaded page but then any click-thru would give some sort of "not found on this server" error...

As far as time is concerned, my forum doesn't take any time really - it takes care of itself; Why? Because hardly anybody uses it...

which is a shame - I like a good chat

MCS
x

Ah, that could explain my lack of visitors

MCS
x

A few more:

1. Think ahead... 20-80 rule. No matter the timing in a community - 20% of your community will create 80% of your posts and threads... Admins, Mods, and most active posters will always be the minority.

Additionally, lurkers always out number posters - normally again 5:1 ratio.

Obviously yourself - you need to be very active - but a crucial component of a successful board is finding the right Mods.

A Moderator doesn't need to be the most active person nor the most knowledgable - they "must" however spawn posts. Anyone can start a thread, post a reply - but the growth of the community need people that make others respond and in quantity.

A Learner [newbie] to the topics can be a great mod [early on] - because the one thing that turns lurkers to members quicker than any thing else... "I KNOW THE ANSWER". When a lurker isn't concerned about looking or feeling stupid they jump right in [it's an ego thing ]!

That is extremely important in the early stages of your community. Early Mods can easily be MVPs [most valuable poster] and not necessarily the spam controller.

2. Value added resources - Think ahead...

Industry News can aid in bulking up the board in threads quickly - particularly if you have auto replies from GoogleNews

KnowledgeBase: keep a watchful eye for the "Best Threads & Posts" that answers newbie questions without a continuous reharshing of the same topic... have a forum specifically for these 'shadows' so mods & active posters can reference quickly... you will also find that lurkers will congregate... that's is an advantage for advertisements and sponsorship.

3. Target Markets - Think Ahead... a community isn't about one group of likeminded membership or a single audience there is always diversity in who you attract. Here at SEOChat [as an example]... an SEO Learning environment

• learners
  
• professionals
  
• sponsors
  
• the person or firm that doesn't want to learn, teach, or advertise - they just want the services of a professional.

I highly doubt there is a forum topical board in the world that "doesn't have a similar set of distinctive groups"... so as you grow - cater to each.

4. Rules, Policies & Guidelines - Think Ahead... so very important particularly because of cultural diversity. Get very specific about what is tolerated and what isn't - it will save lots of headaches later on since your active membership will grow and quickly point out breaches to newbies.

5. Be innivative. Communities are fun - find a distinctive component not directily associated with shop talk that is unique to your board.

As most of the other ones says, its hard. But its not just hard to get the forum started, its also hard to get the forum goin and not fading out. I have that problem myself.
A good thing is if you have a "hardcore" group of 5-6 people, perhaps friends etc, which share your intreset and spending time on the forum and posts.

Excellent posts everyone - I'm just putting a forum together myself.

An alternative to phpBB which i'm looking at currently is a forum called PubBB which may be of interest:



http://www.punbb.org/

I've not had any live experience with it yet, seems to do the job after a bit of testing & definitely worth a look IMO. The majority of the missing features seem to be available via mods and it's also quite easy to reskin.

Hope useful to someone

Hi MCS, the googlebot mod I'm referring to (i think there are a few out there) is called [BETA] Bot Indexing Mod v 1.1.1. written by Adam Marcus.
You can find it here:
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=200361&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

It removes sids for the bots (all of them, not just G), and, as I said, I can verify that this thing works beautifully, because I got outstanding serp results after using it.... You don't need me to tell you to back up all files before you edit them, but i'll throw that in anyway..... i like to use notepad++ to edit .php files; it just works really nicely, but, i'm sure everyone here has got their own personal favorite editors...

If you run into any problems installing it, you know, the phpbb.com community is so incredibly awesome... I say this because I've had all sorts of questions about phpBB, and that community has always answered all my questions. I'm no php guru, so, I've turned to them any number of times for assistance, and I'm so impressed with them, because somebody over there always comes through.

I hope this is of some help.
Many thanks,
kf

Wow, I wasn't getting e-mails on this thread for some reasoin so I thought it died out after the first post. This is great info, forums sound like a lot of work. Still reading all the info in this thread.

Not really... while you do need to put much effort to get it going, to populate to community and keep the interest alive... and community with the right planning is "self sustaining".

The workload is no different than a new enterprise where the owner works their butt off and envisions - but over time others do the workload and you continue to envision... like Microsoft - Bill doesn't code "anything" anymore!

Greetings!

I also have two forums, one of them in particualrily quite active.

When I started I started by inviting active posters from other similar forums to join mine too... to keep them itnersted i go on offering new facilities on milestones (like seochat for example offers signature and avatar at 100 posts) or by organize contests.

And as solution... yes phpbb2 sounds like the best solution to me... and that's becuase of the huge collection of templates and add-ons that may be found.

A site that maybe of interest:
http://www.big-boards.com/

The kit behind the Gaia Online forums/online RPG is fairly impressive - probably higher now as the interview was a while back: http://www.big-boards.com/int.php?n=60b

We just created a new forum in September.

I find it to be a bit of a success because actually I didn't know much about the subject before I created the forum but there was also not so much information on any large site about the subject either.

Actually most people who are into the topic are shunned away on other forums (not an adult topic). It's a business topic which the people who join see it as a potentially large future business I personally write a lot of info from the Tokyo, Japan perspective that others may not think about.

So far we have about 600 really quality post only about 20 members but I think as the theme (business) expands it will grow trememdously. The forum also I believe opens the potential market.

So my point is if the subject is unique & you can add value that others can't then people will join & contribute. I've tried to create a few general ones but doing a unique theme is where it's at homey...

I think that business themes & entertainment themes should be thought of differently.

My latest experience was that we got 26 new members but only a few ever posted. The site pretty much died (it was tied to one person's career, very bad move) and the forum doesn't seem to have survived either. So, what I am saying is, pure numbers can't tell the whole story, Olney's 20 members posted about 600 times, our 26 members posted about 30 times (and half of those were me responding). I am getting ready to launch another forum here in the near future so I will keep you all updated as to my success...