How to Create and Maintain a Successful Forum: 7 Steps

How to Create and Maintain a Successful Forum: 7 Steps

Many of us have, at one time or another, considered starting our own online community. This how-to will give you the advice and tips to make your forum a success.



Steps

1. Decide upon a niche to target with your community. This is harder than it sounds, and creating a forum that is similar in theme to existing and well established forums is a bad idea. Very few people will leave their current forum to move to your new, small forum. Many people have invested lots of their time into a forum, and they will not give that all up just to join your forum.

2. Find some other people that are interested in building the community with you. Having some people working with you will make things a lot better, and you will be able to support each other when the going gets tough.

3. Decide on the theme, and find some friends that are interested in working with you on your new community, you will need to decide on a hosting plan for the forum, i.e. where to host the website that the forum will be on. There are many free forum hosting providers, however, they will give you a subdomain, such as (yourforumname).freeforums.org, which may look unprofessional. Alternatively, you can purchase a domain name and hosting from a web host.

4. Select which forum software you want to use. This is often the most important decision during the creation of the forum, as it can be hard to switch to a different forum software without losing all your existing forum posts. SMF (simple machines forum) is free, and has very few public exploits, meaning it is very secure and is unlikely to be hacked. Other popular forum software includes vBulletin, MyBB and PhpBB.

5. Know that installation instructions will be different depending on which forum software you choose, but in most cases, you will have to download and unzip the forum software after downloading it, upload it into the publicly accessible directory of your web server via ftp, and then create a MySQL database for it (ask your hosting provider for instructions on this). The MySQL database is where forum posts and member information will be stored.

6. Have the forum up and running on your webspace, you can create the boards for the forum (where forum threads will be posted in). Initially, keep to a maximum of maybe 10 boards. Do not have too many off-topic discussion areas, just one 'general discussion' area will do initially.

7. Know that before making the forum public, it is a good idea to create maybe two or three threads in each forum area, so that visitors to the site, and new users, will have somewhere to post. Many new forum users are too shy to post new threads on their own.



Tips

• Reward members who contribute a lot of material and post often, by giving them 'moderator status'. This will have the added benefit of making them feel more of a part of the community, and they may thus work harder.
• It may be tempting to create a forum area for every single topic you can come up with, but too many forum areas can make your forum look empty. Before you create a new forum area, ask yourself whether there will be enough threads and material for the area.
• If you decide to start your forum basing on a ready engine, for example phpBB, then be sure to check up the engine vulnerability and avoid any hacking or injecting problems.

Warnings

• Always ensure that your forum's software is up to date, for security reasons. You can do this by going onto the forum's official website, and comparing the latest version number there, to the version of the forum you have installed.