what are your experience with starting a forum?

I was reading the recipricol links thread and was wondering what it takes to start a forum?
How much time have you guys had to put into it. It seems to me that it takes a lot of moderating. Also, does it increase your sales enough to be worth it? Share what you would like about forums.

The only forum I have started was for my personal site and it was just for fun. It was not as much work as you might think although sometimes the devil's in the details. I think it depends on your level of technical knowledge etc as to how much work it is to get it up and running. The amount of moderating depends on the number of people get to join. Its tough to get people interested and coming back... Mine has only been up for a little while though and the topic died out so maybe other people's experiences will be different. No idea on the sales aspect of things. I don't know that I would do it to increase sales, but rather as a service for my clientele and to hopefully gain a reputation as an information source on my given topic etc. I guess I am trying to say that you might not see many people jumping from your thread to your sales page and buying something, but you might increase your exposure etc and therefore see an increase in sales. If nothing else, it will help your site size and give you some fresh content hopefully.

This could turn into an interesting thread as I was wondering a few things about forums as well. What is the typical pattern of growth for a forum in terms of members? How long does it take to see regular activity? It seems to me that it takes activity to get people there more often so how do you stir up that initial activity and keep it going during lulls?

It's very hard to start a forum. But here is the best tip I can give anyone:

Start with less than 5 forum rooms. If you have too many, the forum will be too large and will look completely empty with alot of rooms registering less than 5 posts for along time.

Hexed

That makes a lot of sense.

Yes. The automatic thing most people think is the more forum rooms there are, the better start the forum will have. It works exactly opposite to that. Realistically, if you have 1-10 members, you should have one room. 11-100 members, 2-3 rooms. 100-500 members, 5 rooms. And so on.

Hexed

I saw the guy that started DP post about how forums happen naturally over time. As a mod/admin you'll notice certain themes that have matured and deserve their own room.

When do you suggest breaking off new sections?I am currently working on a project that will have a forum that could be HUGE when all is said and done but obviously wont start out that way. I am having trouble figuring out how to organize the forums so any suggestions would be welcome.

I wonder if we cant get any suggestions or tips from the people that were involved with getting this one off the ground??? Anyone have any connections? *Wink wink nudge nudge*

EDIT: Hexed and RMC are too quick for me... the answered my questions before I even answered it. Man they are good...

So when do we get the 'The Red Belt is Too Bright' Forum room?

Hexed

So a logical break would be an update room? I am not saying SC needs to do this but thats the type of topic that has earned its own room?

Wait another 925 posts, you'll find out...

Or just follow randfish's non-football threads. That'll keep you learning and humble.

Yea... you should rep them for their forsight! Because there isn't anything as fun as repping posts. Especially ones by rmccarley. Try it and see!

It depends. Using SC as an example I suggested a "Newbie" room to be placed right at the top. It would reduce multiple posts asking the same questions and give shy folks a place to try it out where they won't get jumped on for being "dumb" when they're really new and don't know any better.

As has been suggested, starting a forum can be quite challenging. There is a built-in irony, catch 22, that visitors don't feel inclined to post on a forum with little activity, ie. a new forum, yet, in order to get the forum rolling, it's obviously necessary to have a little activity. That's why, initially, I would encourage you to tell your family, friends, etc. to register and post messages. That I consider to be crucial. You have to get the sucker off the ground, and, if someone stumbles across your forum and sees 3 members and 5 messages, they likely will skip off pretty quickly. In addition to the family and friends, I would suggest you use your forum url keyword phrase as hyperlink in similar type forums, if they allow this.

This brings up the issue of forum seo, which I think is a quite complicated issue in and of itself, and I don't claim to be an expert, but I do have some personal experience. You have to, of course, decide upon which forum software. There are a bunch out there, though, it seems to me vBulletin and phpBB2 are the most popular. vBulletin seems to have better natural seo qualities, and with the php forums you're going to run into seo complications due to session ids. So, if you plan on trying to get the sucker popular and perhaps use it as a marketing tool or a means to garner more traffic, as you suggest, this must be dealt with.

I personally use phpBB2, because that's what I got started with and learned with, and it's FREE and open source with an AMAZINGLY helpful community built around it. Just visit phpbb.com to see what I mean.... that community has saved me numerous times. Now, as compared to vBulletin, phpBB2 has had much more security issues, ie. people have found a lot more exploits, though, just very recently version 2.0.18 has been released, and, this is supposed to be quite secure, though, I would expect little holes and things will be found soon, so, back-up db on a daily basis, and you never have to worry, because if you get hacked, (i did once), you can easily restore back-up mysql by using bigdump (very cool little thing which allows you to upload big mysql file by starting and stopping.)

Another note about phpbb2 community..... there are all sorts of free mods (hacks) available, and, it's open source, and you can really tweak this thing in all sorts of ways.... in respect to dealing with session ids for seo, you're going to absolutely want to use the googlebot mod which you can find on the phpbb.com website. This mod works like magic. I was competing against easy keyword phrase (350,000 results) and before I installed this mod, I couldn't find myself in G....... afterwards, I was #6. So, you get the idea, this mod is a must. I also recommend the resize picture hack, which is very cool, because if someone posts a pic, say 1200 pixels wide, it steps in and resizes and makes image clickable to see full size.... this is important so as not to break your forum layout. And, there are a ton of templates, so you can create an interesting look or design your own template.... if you know how to write php that is good, but it's not necessary.

There is a book called "Building Online Communities with phpBB2" written by Stoyan Stefanov and published by Packt Publishing. If you use phpBB2 as your forum software, I recommend you purchase this book, because it will help you big time.

You ask about the time required to run a forum. Well, i don't think it's all that intensive, because, when it picks up, you can make people moderators, so, there's a lot of people to keep an eye on things. Furthermore, I think being forum admin is a lot of fun.

So, you asked for people to share what they wanted about forums. There is some of my personal experience, which very well may differ from the next guys as I don't claim to be the "forum expert." This seochat has been quite helpful to me so far, and I hope this possibly helps someone else.

Take care, kf.

AAAaaaarrrrg! I'm out of rep, but what an awsome post! Thanks kbf!