Best Places To Learn About Building A Forum.
 

I'd love to learn more about building forums, and communities. More specifically learning about member loyalty, retention rates, how to create conversation, managing moderator teams etc, but there doesn't seem to be much info around.

Can anyone recommend good blogs, forums, conferences that cover the topic on a deep level?

The proboards support forum has a surprising amount of content on exactly what you're asking for. Most of it is tailored for proboards forums but you can apply most of the discussions to other forum softwares, like vbulletin.

Fantastic thanks mate!

start with http://thecommunitymanager.com/ and go from there...

Also, it wouldn't hurt to purchase some book on the subject - start with Buzzing Communities: How to Build Bigger, Better, and More Active Online Communities and any other similar books at Amazon