Forum On My Site-Worth It?

Forums are one of the best ways to get user generated content. As you can see this forum is doing wonderful. The learning curve is in how to manage the forum, encourage participation and prevent spam.

Ok I have a wordpress site. I installed simplepress but I couldn't see the other templates and didn't like them much. Any advice for Wordpress based forums?

It depends. If you're selling any sort of product that needs a lot of user support, I would say a forum is absolutely not a good idea. It will turn into a big mess of negativity. Rather than people submitting support tickets, they'll put it publicly on a forum... and then get angry when they're not assisted on the forum. It will become a huge "sucker" of your time and will just turn into a big mess. While we do have user forums, they were created many years ago and if I had to do it again, I would never have gone the forum route. We don't put forums on any of our new sites these days.

I'm not saying all forums are bad and this will happen to, but from my experience, it's way more hassle that it's worth. Yes, it's a way to generate user content, but honestly, the odds of the forum running on its own and not causing you A LOT of heachache, is pretty slim, in my opinion.

Brad
P.S. I've seen absolutely zero increase in traffic because of our forums, which are very large and have thousands of indexed pages in the search engines.

Hello,
I have always done well with forums, it keeps customers longer on your website.

I always recommend forums. In most cases they are hard to get started, but sometimes they kick right in. It all depends on the subject matter.

I have found a good way to get people posting is to start an ask the expert category.

I tried with a forum. But we have a difficulty to keep users in our new forums, since we see big forums like Warrior. I prefer you to go with blogs.

Cool, just looking at a way to drive more organic traffic and get new eyeballs on my site.

A forum is more work than any other type of website I've ever had anything to do with. Once I had links out in articles, I started getting over a hundred spammers for each (apparently) valid sign up.

Some of the spam is pretty crude, not what you want people to see on a site.

If you are going to be offline for a day, you need someone to cover for you and moderate. It can't be done by one person in my experience.

Also the competition is massive. I don't think there is any niche left without a few forums.

I run a reasonable sized forum (300,000+ posts), the learning curve is about 2 weeks to a month with a product like vBulletin. Here's the rule though - if you don't have a site that is about something that lots of people are very passionate about then forget about having a forum. An empty forum with 10 sections and about 2 posts in each is enough to turn potential customers away from your site. A couple of things that people are extremely passionate about include fitness, martial arts and fighting, making music or another creative process, betting etc. It's got to be about something that users have lots to say about and will be driven to posting their own content on over and over. Something that sparks debate, arguments, ego stroking and back scratching. Getting started is the hardest part, convincing people to fill a forum full of tumbleweeds is the biggest hurdle.