Page 3 - what are your experience with starting a forum?

I have been invloled (to some extent) with starting two forums.
One was an SEO forum. I helped Derek Chew get www.seoplace.com rolling. It had some reasonable interest for a while but a limited number of users which is ultimately what a forum needs.
It needed a lot of moderating, got hacked and caused problems but was a good forum. Its now offline I believe. I check back occasionaly.

The second was for a company who I did a large ecommerce site for. They weren't very organised, completely changed their target market after buyong 10Ks worth of stock (which they had to virtually give away). They then started a forum which they posted some info in (which was false) about a successful sale and a happy customer, and that was it. A complete waaste of time for them, but then I don''t think they were destined to succeed.

After checking the logs and scratching my head as to why they had zero sales from an effective PPC campaign and some good early SEO results it becamse clear to me that their so called expert designer had put in some fancy looking form buttons on the buy now and proceed to check out section, looked great but when you don't put an action on an HTML form not a lot happens!

At this point I gave up with them!

I have also developed (but not quite finished a with so many things) a very simpple text based (no database) forum that uns on PHP and only require wrtie access to one directory to work. ITs very portable, has member configuration and has admin facilities. It works ok but is very rough around the edges. This was a make do project that I may revive at some point.

Basically I think for forums to work well they realy need lots of traffic and interest from the word go.

I have 15 forums
Some are big and buzzing and others are dead and starting.

A lot of the forum is built on the owners personality.

Look what happened with seorefugee.
It was built from fallout here but because the owner lacks any kind of personality or abilty it is dead in the water and full of rubbish.

Forums take passion or luck and i find it very hit or miss even though i put a lot of energy into some of them.

I don't know... the "Google is Broken thread" was good for a chuckle...

I wouldnt know about the threads.
The owners dad banned me and reported me to the Fbi for making smart comments on the forum

No seriously , its true.

I think the Fbi were busy that day though solving international crime.

One never knows, nowadays.