How easy is it to start your own forum?

kylah16 · 20-05-07

How easy is it to start your own forum? Do I need any programming experience or is their a template as such that you can use as I've seen many forums with the same layout.

Keith · 20-05-07

Starting a forum is pretty straight forward http://www.phpbb.com/ and http://www.simplemachines.org/ are popular platforms as is vBulletin which is what A4u use.

The hard part about forums is attracting members especially active members.

drivetowin · 20-05-07

There are a number of standard packages - many forums use phpbb or vbulletin.

Doing a google search for them should give you the info you need.

Donk · 20-05-07

It can be very simple with the right hosting.

You need to get your website hosted on a linux server which offers php mysql and "fantastico".

With fantatico you get about 50 ready to instal scripts including blogs, cms and forums which can be very simply installed in a matter of minutes.

Without fantastico many of these scripts are much more difficult to install. You also need to check regularly for security updates.

If you don't have fantastico you could try http://www.phpbb.com/ .This is one of the easiest to install yourself.

hyipcoder · 20-05-07

phpbb is the worst script..you get your site hacked after a couple of weeks if you are not careful in security matters.... I suggest SMF but is not recommended for starters.... I can share you a Vb script for free if you are interested...

kylah16 · 20-05-07

Quote:

Originally Posted by hyipcoder

phpbb is the worst script..you get your site hacked after a couple of weeks if you are not careful in security matters.... I suggest SMF but is not recommended for starters.... I can share you a Vb script for free if you are interested...

Thanks for the offer but I wouldn't know what to do with it! Wouldn't it be easier to download it from the vbulletin website?

kylah16 · 20-05-07

Just checked out the vbulletin website - didn't realise you had to pay!

zaq · 20-05-07

Its very easy to start a forum, its getting people to join and post daily is the hard part but you can know pay people to post to kick start the forum if you have the money, just to a search in google and you find lots of companies offering this "pay to post" service etc

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en...st+forum&meta=

if you looking for forum software just take a look at A4U using vBulletin

Orion · 20-05-07

Getting "critical mass" isn't easy and takes a lot of work especially if your forum is not unique.

Newsletters are a good idea - if you can get people to sign up for the newsletter when they register then you can at least remind people that the forum still exists. Otherwise people will register, post once, and then forget about it.

getvisible · 20-05-07

I've used both simple machines and phpbb3.

The good thing with simple machines is that it's easy to block spammers as you can do it by ip address (range), email address, hostname etc.

I've started a forum using phpbb3 (Delivery Hell) and have found it easy to use, although I haven't had many attempts at spam so far. I'll have to work that solution out when it comes.

Quote:

Getting "critical mass" isn't easy and takes a lot of work especially if your forum is not unique.

Tell me about it. I've only just had my first unpromted post. Thankfully the forum is pretty unique apart from the plethora of review sites.

savespy · 20-05-07

I've been impressed with the Vanilla forum - http://getvanilla.com

Not really knowing anything about php I was able to install it and customise the look and feel quite a bit. There’s a bunch of add-ons and templates you can download from here without needing any coding knowledge - http://lussumo.com/addons/

Here's an example site I think uses it really well with some customisation - http://www.younggogetter.com/forum/

Agree with Orion, hard to get active members and a lot will sign up once and forget all about it. Newsletter’s a good idea for reminding them and I’d also suggest rewarding your best users with prizes or some other kind of incentive.

I tried a couple of the paid forum posting services which have worked well for others here but the posts I got were so bad I had to go read my spam folder afterwards to restore my faith in the written word.