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Does anyone here have experience running a forum?

by The Chris
15 replies
One of my projects for next year is to create a content site that I want to eventually become a high page rank authority site. Message boards are a great tool for turning visitors into a community and encourage them to become daily visitors, but I have a few concerns.

1. Bandwidth. I've seen lots of forum owners complain that active forums take up tons of bandwidth and cost a lot to maintain, require dedicated servers, server upgrades, etc.

2. Security. I've also heard that forums are often targets for hackers and I don't want to have to spend a fortune paying someone to protect the forum.

3. Distracting attention from the site. I would like to have the forum as part of the site so people can easily navigate from the content to the forums and back, but most forums I've seen don't have any links back to the main site.

So, do I need to pay for vBulletin or are the free forums that can be auto installed from cPanel good enough? Is a forum a good idea to further monetize a site or are is the ROI not worth the headaches? Thanks a bunch for any advice.
#experience #forum #running
  • Profile picture of the author mclauchlan
    Chris,

    A good start if you host with Hostgator is to install the free SMF forum software.

    I started doing this a while ago and SMF is easy to use and flexible with the sites initially monetized with Adsense. The flexibility means you can keep control of the site and subsequently your bandwidth.

    Personally I found forums a bit labour intensive especially if you have lots of them, and keeping an eye on spammers can be a pain if you don't install the correct security.

    With that said I still actively use forums in my marketing mix.

    What I would recommend you do is research your niche and take a look at bigboards.com at some of the good performing forums and work out the potential ROI which can be quite good.

    Best of luck

    John
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    • Profile picture of the author HostWind
      Originally Posted by mclauchlan View Post

      Chris,

      A good start if you host with Hostgator is to install the free SMF forum software.

      I started doing this a while ago and SMF is easy to use and flexible with the sites initially monetized with Adsense. The flexibility means you can keep control of the site and subsequently your bandwidth.

      Personally I found forums a bit labour intensive especially if you have lots of them, and keeping an eye on spammers can be a pain if you don't install the correct security.

      With that said I still actively use forums in my marketing mix.

      What I would recommend you do is research your niche and take a look at bigboards.com at some of the good performing forums and work out the potential ROI which can be quite good.

      Best of luck

      John
      I would advise against starting with SMF, Vbulleting is the standard in forums, and if you want to gain instant authority and respect use Vbulleting, SMF even a well skinned SMF screams of amature forum creator. Plus moving from SMF to Vbulletin when you decide you have to will be a big pain in the ass. Plus it will be easier to just learn one forum software instead of several
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      • Profile picture of the author iobeek
        Originally Posted by HostWind View Post

        I would advise against starting with SMF, Vbulleting is the standard in forums, and if you want to gain instant authority and respect use Vbulleting, SMF even a well skinned SMF screams of amature forum creator. Plus moving from SMF to Vbulletin when you decide you have to will be a big pain in the ass. Plus it will be easier to just learn one forum software instead of several
        ??? :rolleyes:
        scream of amature ? Jeez
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        • Profile picture of the author howinfo
          We did include forum to our career site but it is taking bit longer to take of as we expected but it has increased traffic to our site and even the adsense revenue. I think that the hardest part is to get it running and get it to that critical mass but once you have got it running properly and you have enough members it can be really valuable to the whole site or even on its own.
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  • Profile picture of the author Kevin Riley
    Chris

    Can't help you on the security part, as I didn't run the forum more than 6 months, but can tell you about the platform. I recently ran a temporary forum for the latest Warrior Forum Private Workshop.

    I used Simple Machines to set up the forum (in my Fantastico on HostGator's C-panel). That took about 2-3 minutes. Then, I went and found a nice-looking theme for it. I used Anecdota.

    I created a custom header image. Took me awhile to insert it, as I didn't realize the permissions on a forum are more restrictive. After temporarily changing permissions on a higher-level folder, I was able to change images.

    After that, it was a half day of fiddling about, setting up boards, etc.

    One problem I ran into: Shortly after opening the forum and getting many people using it, it started exceeding the resources at my hosting. Had to quickly set it up on a dedicated server. So, I would get yourself a dedicated prior to building your forum (save yourself the half day of panic I went through).
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  • Profile picture of the author snowbored
    What CMS do you use? Joomla + Kunena works pretty nice for me. I use Jomsocial (which is kind of expensive) to hook it all together in a web 2.0 way, but if you don't go that fancy it is all free. What's nice is that you have one account for the website and forum for users, and the theme for the site is inherited by the forum. PM if you have any questions on that setup.
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    • Profile picture of the author The Chris
      Originally Posted by mclauchlan View Post

      A good start if you host with Hostgator is to install the free SMF forum software.

      I started doing this a while ago and SMF is easy to use and flexible with the sites initially monetized with Adsense. The flexibility means you can keep control of the site and subsequently your bandwidth.

      What I would recommend you do is research your niche and take a look at bigboards.com at some of the good performing forums and work out the potential ROI which can be quite good.
      Excellent advice. This is for a very competitive (and lucrative) niche, but I believe I can create a successful site as long as I make it my main focus for a few months, something I haven't been able to do yet.
      Originally Posted by Kevin Riley View Post

      Chris
      I used Simple Machines to set up the forum (in my Fantastico on HostGator's C-panel). That took about 2-3 minutes. Then, I went and found a nice-looking theme for it. I used Anecdota.

      I created a custom header image. Took me awhile to insert it, as I didn't realize the permissions on a forum are more restrictive. After temporarily changing permissions on a higher-level folder, I was able to change images.

      After that, it was a half day of fiddling about, setting up boards, etc.

      One problem I ran into: Shortly after opening the forum and getting many people using it, it started exceeding the resources at my hosting. Had to quickly set it up on a dedicated server. So, I would get yourself a dedicated prior to building your forum (save yourself the half day of panic I went through).
      Thank you! I looked into it and dedicated servers aren't as expensive as they were when I checked a few years ago, so that's good.
      Originally Posted by snowbored View Post

      What CMS do you use? Joomla + Kunena works pretty nice for me. I use Jomsocial (which is kind of expensive) to hook it all together in a web 2.0 way, but if you don't go that fancy it is all free. What's nice is that you have one account for the website and forum for users, and the theme for the site is inherited by the forum. PM if you have any questions on that setup.
      I was going to use Wordpress because it's so SEO friendly and there are so many great plugins, but I've been meaning to try Joomla out. Maybe I'll play around with it on my testing domain.

      Thanks for all the answers, I appreciate it.
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  • Profile picture of the author AFI
    I used to run a forum that had a few thousand members. I didn't notice any difference in bandwidth and it was a very active forum. I used PHPBB which is a other very common forum script and it's free and very easy to set up. It's also "skinnable" meaning you can change the skins for it.

    It also has plugins where you can make it more secure and such but yeah I think my forum did take away traffic from my main site.
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  • Profile picture of the author Audrey Harvey
    I have run a successful SMF forum just on shared hosting, it was a pet photography forum and it had plenty of content, and had no problems with resources.

    It is possible for your forum to get hacked (you can imagine the type of photos that were added to my photography forum!), but there are things you can do to prevent that ie use captchas and member approved registration.
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  • Profile picture of the author jazbo
    I have run big forums using SMF and PhpBB and never had any issues other than the automated account spam, which I don't care about as long as they create profile links and dont actually spam the forum itself.
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  • Profile picture of the author Anonymous Affiliate
    I've run an active forum using vBulleting (in my opinion, the best forum platform there is). Bandwidth is not a problem unless everyone and their mother upload pictures, files, etc. The problem is time management as a forum admin: if it gets active, it will suck your time silly!
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  • Profile picture of the author Lloyd Buchinski
    Originally Posted by The Chris View Post

    I would like to have the forum as part of the site so people can easily navigate from the content to the forums and back, but most forums I've seen don't have any links back to the main site.
    At least for this part you don't need anything sophisticated. With SMF it isn't difficult to add an item to the typical forum nav bar.

    SMF also has a very active support forum.

    But brace yourself for a lot of work. With all the automated spam bots mixed in with the human spammers, it's not something that one person can handle. You need at least another moderator to start out.
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  • Profile picture of the author iobeek
    As far as bandwidth is concerned, use fluxbb. It's fast and easy on the server/bandwidth.

    Originally Posted by Anonymous Affiliate View Post

    if it gets active, it will suck your time silly!
    That is why you should get some moderators early in the game and bring gifts to the table
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  • Profile picture of the author The Chris
    I definitely will add moderators early on, which should be easy. From my experience many forum users foam at the mouth when presented with the opportunity. I saw a Joomla theme that would be perfect for the site and I think I'll get vBulletin. This is a business move, not a hobby, so I'm willing to invest money as long as it's well spent.

    Thanks for all the advice!
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  • Profile picture of the author tryinhere
    invisionpower.com

    have a peek over here as well, i am tied between vb and this ?
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