Adding discussion forums to your site

Forums enable people to come together to discuss common interests.

If you would like to create your own forum, there are a few things you need to consider.

Large forums use a lot of bandwidth
Large forums have thousands of active members, with the largest having hundreds of thousands of members.  Bandwidth refers to the amount of traffic (people) coming to your site and the megabytes that they download (each page that a person looks at is a download)

Build it and they will come?
No, they won’t. If you create a forum and simply plonk it on your website – it is highly optimistic to expect that people will flock in. Making a successful discussion forum is quite difficult read on for tips.

Creating your forums
Do your research:

Do you have time for a forum?
Discussion boards can be very time-intensive and can need a lot of moderation. You will need to be checking your forum posts for spam and for things like racist or aggressive messages to other forum members. Some forums may never attract these type of posts, while others will have to be monitored on a daily or even hourly basis.
If you don’t have time to moderate the forum, you will lose members.

Design a theme for your forum
The look of your forums should match the rest of your website. Or you may be able to download a ‘skin’ that has colors that match your site.

Plan your categories
Plan your categories on paper before you start creating them in your forum software. It’s very easy to get muddled once you begin!
Ensure that all of your categories, and category descriptions, are spelt correctly. It will make your forums look very amateur if you have spelling mistakes here.
Remember that it’s better to have fewer categories than dozens of categories – your discussion board will be quite empty at first. Choose main categories first – you can always add sub-categories later.

Forum rules:
Every forum needs a set of rules. Write out a set of rules that you expect forum members to abide by.  If you’re not sure what to write – take a look at the guidelines at similar forums to the one you’ll be starting.

Free forums software

Jcink
jcinkforumboards are run on a modified version of the Invision Power Boards software. It’s free to create a forum and the forum is hosted on jcink’s own servers.

Forumer
The largest phpBB forum hosting company since 2003.

BuddyPress
This is a free plugin for a WordPress site. (WordPress is also free.)

Placing advertisements on your forums
Placing your ads on your forums can be successful, but it can also be true that forum members are too busy discussing topics to notice your ads. They may have ad-blocking enabled, and cannot see your ads.
Forums can help bring people to your website, and can keep them there – but you will need to place ads that are highly relevant to forum users.
Using ads that flash, or using pop-up ads, may drive users away from your forums.