Getting a forum started

[jwood]

Does anyone have any advice or tips on getting a forum started?

What I'm talking about has nothing to do with IT or Edugeek, but is a website relating to another personal interest.

I am strugglng to get past the chicken and egg situation. I.e. nobody posts on a forum that isn't seen to be active and busy, but it won't get busy unless people sign up!

Other forums, including Edugeek have managed it so it must be possible.

Any ideas?

[Diello]

Take a look at TAZ - plenty of good articles and advice on offer

Admin Zone Forums - Discussion Forums & Resources for Online Community Administrators

[kerrymoralee9280]

You get listed on Google? My football team website gets over 3000 hits a month - not bad for a sunday league football team in a tiny village.

I would have thought it's because my site shows up first in google when the obvious keywords are searched for.

To be honest, 2 years ago I didn't know this place existed. It was a new technician at the school who told me about it, so maybe that's a major thing - word of mouth.

Also put the word out at club events over the country. Find out about any events related to your site and get the word out.

[ZeroHour]

One simple tip would be to move the forums from a different domain as the main site. That will destroy your SEO (search engine optimization) and mean your site is less likely to appear properly in google and other engines.

[ICT_GUY]

Spam is going to be your enemy, auto sign ups are a nightmare.

On the forums I set up this was the reson I closed all four of them down. Typically I was getting 20 spam bots a day signing up (though they couldn't usually post since the email verification cuts this down).

Still, the user names were enogh to upset a lot of people, and the website links in their profile were often to poison web pages or to sex sites.

There are anti spam bot routines to put in place but they work to different degrees.