Establishing an online forum

by Eproc
5 replies
Hello everyone,
I am looking into establishing an online forum for a medium sized industry association and would be grateful for advice on the following two areas:

1. Recommendation for a suitable platform (e.g. VBulletin, myBB)

2. Guidance for best practice structure for the online forum (e.g. how to moderate etc etc)

Thank you all
#establishing #forum #online
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  • Profile picture of the author GordonJ
    Originally Posted by Eproc View Post

    Hello everyone,
    I am looking into establishing an online forum for a medium sized industry association and would be grateful for advice on the following two areas:

    1. Recommendation for a suitable platform (e.g. VBulletin, myBB)

    2. Guidance for best practice structure for the online forum (e.g. how to moderate etc etc)

    Thank you all
    Our forum, now in it's 19th consecutive year, runs on an earlier, albeit stable, version of vBulletin. It has been very reliable.

    Also, you might want to check out MemberGate type software, especially if Admin is a one man job or you want/need an easy solution.

    The "secret" to an active forum, is getting people to participate, and associations usually have a collective knowledge the members seek, or want to stay up on.

    Wikipedia has a nice Comparison of
    Internet Forum Software
    . That might help you with your research.

    GordonJ
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  • Profile picture of the author Oziboomer
    Mike Rhodes runs a nice forum using Xenforo.

    You may like to checkout the platform as it was developed by the former lead developers of VBulletin and it has a good user experience.

    I've been considering using it as a membership platform for a group of my members.

    Best regards,

    Ozi
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  • Profile picture of the author Mega Vaper
    I hear that BBPress is a pretty good option.
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  • Profile picture of the author savidge4
    I personally run Xenforo.. for an internal network forum / Code snippet storage, and out on the net I am running 3 setups currently. Ive been using it for 5? yrs now, I love it, It does everything I need it to, and with the right modules it can do even more. Support is top notch, real quick to answer questions and resolve problems.
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  • Profile picture of the author brettb
    I started a forum a year ago with phpBB. I now have a few regular posters.


    phpBB is much better these days. The bigger problem is competing with Reddit, Quora, FB etc.


    I was lucky in that a couple of big forums in my niche shut down, so I've got a few of their members.


    This is 2019 not 2005 so don't expect it to be an easy task.
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