Many of us, at some point, have considered the idea of starting our own online community. In this guide you will find tips and tricks to make your forum a real success.
Steps
Step 1. Decide the target of your community
This step is more difficult than it sounds, and creating a forum that is too similar to other popular forums is not a good idea. Very few users will choose to leave their forum to start following your small, new forum. Many users spend a considerable amount of time following a forum, and they certainly won't stop following their favorite forum to switch to yours.
Step 2. Find other people interested in building an online community with you
Working as a team will make things a lot easier, and we can solve problems together when things don't go well.
Step 3. Decide on a topic to focus the forum on, and find friends interested in working with you
You will also need to find a forum hosting service, which is a server on which to host the forum. There are many free hosting providers, but they will give you a subdomain like ilnomedeltuoforum.freeforums.org, which is not exactly the best of professionalism. Alternatively, you can buy a domain from a web hosting service.
Step 4. Choose the suitable software
This is a very important decision in the creation of the forum. Choose the software carefully, because if you decide to change it later you could risk losing all the posts accumulated in the forum. SMF (Simple Machines Forum) is free and fairly secure software. Other popular forum management software are vBullettin, MyBB and PhpBB.
Step 5. The installation instructions differ from software to software, but generally, you will have to download the archive with the software and extract it, then you will have to upload it to a publicly accessible directory on the server via FTP and create a MySQL database for the forum (ask how to do it to your service provider)
The MySQL database is the place where information about posts and forum members is stored.
Step 6. Start the forum on your web space
Create boards for the forum (i.e. the sections where threads are created). Initially, stick to a maximum of 10 sections. Don't create too many off-topic discussion areas. At first, a simple "general discussion" area will suffice.
Step 7. Before making the forum public it would be a good idea to create at least two or three threads in each section, so that new users of the site have something to post to
Many new forum users may be too shy to create a new thread right away.
Advice
- You may be tempted to create a new area for every single topic that comes to your mind, but splitting the threads into too many areas will make the forum seem empty. Before creating a new area, take a look at the number of threads of the various sections and ask yourself if there is really a need.
- Reward members who contribute to the forum more than others by assigning the status of "moderator". This will help them feel more part of the community and encourage them to work hard.
- If you have decided to create a forum based on a ready-made engine, such as phpBB, be sure to first check the security holes of the version you have chosen to avoid hacking and injection problems.
