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How hard is it to build a forum

by imon32red
10 replies
Most of what I have done for the last 6 months has been with the Kindle.

I have a friend that belongs to a gaming community. He wants me to build a forum for his network of friends (something like 200 to 400).

I have hosting with hostgator. How hard would it be to put together a forum? I have built a few Wordpress sites that have not done much. That is about the extent of my website building.
#build #forum #hard
  • Profile picture of the author Louise Green
    I think Hostgater comes with Cpanel and Fantastico, have a look in there and you should be able to install a forum with a couple of clicks.
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    • Profile picture of the author businessmatt
      What Louise said. There's a bunch that are easy to install and easy to use. vBulletin is always popular.
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  • Profile picture of the author Luxuria
    I can tell you first hand that building a large community forum that runs itself is something you'll have to work on for months.

    It's rather easy to set one up however, if that's all you want.
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  • Profile picture of the author Vic Shake
    building a forum is easy but then to gain active members and retaining will take time and work for months
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    • Profile picture of the author Cecille20
      Banned
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      • Profile picture of the author imon32red
        I tried the phpbb with hostgator, but it was a little user unfriendly to me. I uninstalled it and installed SMF with hostgator. It seesm to be a lot more user friendly. I hope to have it configured and live by tomorrow. Thanks everyone.
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  • Profile picture of the author butters
    How about a phpbb forum, have you looked at that?
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    • Profile picture of the author vneely
      Originally Posted by butters View Post

      How about a phpbb forum, have you looked at that?
      PHPBB is probably one of the best ones. However, like others have said, many web hosts offer quick installations of forum software. Getting a forum up and running is easy-peasy.

      Getting active members, fostering a vibrant community, fighting off trolls and spammers, recruiting reliable forum moderators to stomp out the flames... THAT'S the tough part. Still, if your friend already has 200 or more friends ready to pop into the forum and stir things up, the first half of the battle may not be so hard.
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  • Profile picture of the author jficarro
    Building a forum is easy with cpanel. use phpbb. It's a good start and fairly intuitive. Depending on the "community" platform that is already in place - importing the users may be a daunting task. But, there are import options using cvs, etc.

    Vbulliten is arguably the best (this forum is using it), but it is not free and is IMO a little less intuitive at first.
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    • Profile picture of the author imon32red
      Thanks everyone. I just want something simple to set up. I intend to run a banner ad campaign on the left side, which I hope will pay for the domain..

      My friend is going to run it, so hopefully there is very little work on my end once it is set up.
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  • Profile picture of the author SurajSodha
    vbulletin's new interface looks good and if you want to get started with a pro forum & community feature which gives you decent usability and features
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