Building a good forums
 

Hey guys, i'm not much of a forum builder. How do you guy establish a well formed forum?

At the moment, I'm still putting the pieces together for my forum. It's mainly gonna be able gaming, politics, Art, entertainment and a few other ninches, What kind of advice would you guys give to someone like me who would like to have a well established forum?

EDIT: For those who care, Here is my forum. It's still in the works right now. CLICK HERE

Nice skin not sure about the header does not go well with the skin also I would not of put it in a forum folder would look better without that extra forum in the url. Your blog skin is white that needs fixed and am sure cms is the same but can't tell as guests can't see it

I might made it a little unclear of what i mean by making a forums. Sorry about that.

What I'm practically saying is "how do I get alot of members to my forums"? I would use VBSEO, but natually it's no longer around.

What did you do to get all your members on your forums?

You need to reduce the amount of sections you have, or at least group them into sub-forums. Seeing too many sections is overwhelming for guests and discourages them from registering, especially when they can see they are empty/inactive.

Start small, then slowly expand.

I'll take any recommendation

remove the test member and install these
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=268208
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=294633
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=248042
if you need help with the last mod follow this post

Also you should take into account the chances of annoying legitimate users with your anti-spam postures. One of the best ways to KILL a forum is to moderate new members - new members can't do anything but read until a moderator approves their account. If this takes more than a few minutes to get accomplished, people will just leave and never return.

Also, the use of captchas, puzzles and the like annoy people and newer autospam programs have defeated those for the most part anyway. If it doesn't go smoothly on first couple of attempts, folks just give up and leave.


vBulletin4 doesn't need vBSEO, that's why it is no longer around. :) It doesn't need any SEO help, right out of the box.

@force
Test is my other testing account, I need him to validate other memebers problems without invading personal privacy.
And, do i really need 3 spambot removal addons?

@max
I have a question and answer Human verification which is "What does 2+2 equal?" And, 'm sure that any mere child could answer that, and a bot right off the bat, is gonna have a little difficulty with iit.

Believe it or not, that is a very simple question for a bot to answer, you need multiple Q & A But even 1 weak question will completely ruin the effectiveness of Q&A. Update the questions regularly.

It takes years to "build" a community...and it seems there is a website and community for almost anything now on the internet.

I like your sections, well done!

Try to get permission from the admins of a popular forum to post a link to your website, it will definately increase traffic.

Is the correct answer the numeral 4, or the word four? If it's the word, is it with a capital letter? All caps?

Did you know that auto-register programs such as XRumer have defeated the Q&A as well? No matter how good you think your questions/answers are.

It just irritates folks.If you check them out you will see that are not for "spambot removal" they actually stop spam bots from even registering.

You started this thread for advice?

fair point

yes, I did.

I installed all these when i first started my forum. since that time they have all been removed. If you are lucky enough for your forum to grow into a big forum like i was those things hurt you in the end in my opinion. I had spamomatic for over year and i let it run deleting all spammer accounts. However in the end my forum has a smaller member count that it would have if i would of let the spammer have the accounts and just ban them. Does a higher member count help? Of course it does.

I disagree with this also. I do all of those things and my forum keeps growing and growing. I get well over 150k unique hits a month to my forum now and very active forums in fact i have to run my forums on two dedicated servers. If you have a popular site nothing will stop people from getting in. Trust me i have tried all the suggestions in this thread so i know.

I've never recommended or liked spam-o-matic. But the other two linked, don't bother legitimate humans at all and none would even know they exist. So there is no way those hurt a forum in any way. Additionally, "Spambot Stopper" wasn't even around when you started your forum.:D

You like having thousands of fake user accounts in your member list. Most do not.You want the spammers to register successfully, but you don't want their spam posts? That's a *snigger*

Yes, that is correct. Anything that makes your forum look larger is more appealing. This is my opinion maybe not yours.

None of this is going to affect if you are successful or not.

To build a successful forum you must have traffic and people posting. To get there is a whole other story.

It's different for everyone. I was lucky enough to purchase one forum and get all the members from two other forums that failed. There is a lot of luck involved along with your experience.

No one will ever open a forum create sections and people just appear from nowhere, you must mold and build it yourself. Starting by posting yourself. We now have over 5 million posts, and 9 staff members to help run the forums. We must be doing something right :)


I'm not bragging I am trying to make the OP understand that it takes years to build a successful forum. Most forums fail within a month. Just go around clicking links here to forums. Most of the links are dead.

If you want to be successful you must look at what successful forums are doing. I started out watching digitalpoint. That guy has it down to a science.

And he does it without VBSEO and all the addons.

However, he did switch to Xenforo recently.

And that was the question posed by the OP.

If people want 10,000 spam accounts just sitting there in the member's list, more power to them. I have my doubts as to whether that makes people want to sign on. Much easier and more efficient though just to put in a fake number and call it good.:D

More to the point you were trying to make - "if you build it they will come" really does work almost no matter what, IF you have the right niche as your site's topic.

I just got finished fixing a major annoyance problem on someone else's BIG board - 200,000 members with about half that active, and 1000+ of those, actively posting while I was working. The site isn't what anyone would call "slick" by any measure - they don't use any fancy add-ons or any kind of SEO and it's a 3.8.2 for crying out loud - but its niche topic is huge - boxing!

The advice given so far here is sound for someone just starting out with a new board. But take note: If your topic is way too specialized, like crochet needles for example, prepare to languish with a perpetually slow board.

It really all does start with the board topic and goes from there.

I guess you have all the answers, no point and continuing. I would really be interested in seeing the Alexa rank on your largest forum. I suspect i already know the answer.

Clearly you didn't bother reading my post. I was AGREEING with your main point.

I bet that's a habit of yours, not really reading people's posts. We've seen it twice already, in just this thread.