Forum Moderators: rogerd
Now the owner of the larger forum has decided to get a life (!) and is closing it down at the end of the month (the forum is the entire site). I've offered to set up a place forum members can migrate to; while I certainly don't expect all of the members to follow the trail, it will still be a lot busier than anything I've had up until now. So the things I've thought about doing when I expanded the forum "some day" suddenly have to be done now.
What I'm looking at so far:
I've decided to go with IPB and its blog add-on. The larger board has been losing activity to (mostly) LiveJournal, and IMHO this niche has reached the point where there has to be some blog connectivity. The IPB add-on lets members either start a new blog on the site or make an integrated link to a blog they have elsewhere, and the latter is probably even more important than the former in keeping the forum sticky. I haven't seen any other package to do this seamlessly and easily; rolling my own is not an option at this point, and I don't mind paying the license fees in order to have this functionality.
The site's hosting account is up for annual renewal next month, so I can easily upgrade then. In the meantime, my host gives a warning when you've reached 80% of your bandwidth use and you can purchase extra for that specific month if you want. But I still think I should let them know to expect the usage to go up a lot, so they don't wonder what's going on.
The current forum has a great community, and I've known some of the members for years, so after I get things rolling I don't think I'll have trouble finding some good mods.
Although it brings in a little income through niche-specific affiliate links, this site has always been and remains a labor of love (the niche has been a passion of mine for longer than the current forum's owner has been alive). Any costs involved are ones I can afford, so I don't need advice on monetizing the forum or making it search-engine friendly. I have a pretty good handle (I think) on what forums and subforums to start with.
And, because of my modding activity I've been reading this subforum for a couple of years and have learned a lot that will now get put to full use.
---But I'm sure there are still things waiting to drop onto my head that I'm not ready for. Any more advice on how to prepare for opening a forum that doesn't need to start off slowly by pulling in a lot of new members?
I can't think of any other advice to offer you right now except have fun with your new toy!
I'd pay attention to your topic organization - start with a modest number of topics, and expand them as activity increases. There's no bigger turnoff than to visit a forum and see that only two topics out of twenty have had activity in the last day. (Well, maybe ZERO out of twenty would be worse!)
You may find that people are doing all their posting on one topic - that's pretty common in a new, not too busy forum. I'd be aggressive about moving threads into the right place to show activity in several topics and to train your members. (Again, this presupposes a small number of initial topics.)
Good luck!
But reading through this particular topic really has me leaning towards just going with my blog and newsletters and call it enough. The idea of adding fresh content via the forum is appealing but I'm wondering if it's worth the trouble.
..and one of my concerns is the absence of enough traffic to make it look attractive to some potential advertisers ..
IMO, basing whether or not to put up a customer forum based on how much advertising you can get for is totally backwards.
On the other hand, if you can get a forum going, you'll end up with a lot more activity, more pageviews, more repeat visits, more content, etc.
I've been in touch with IPB to make sure everything is set up as needed before the install, and they brought up a couple of things I need to do regarding my hosting (no difficulties involved, I just have to do them).
And, rogerd, I agree about the number of subforums, etc. The current board has pretty much lost its "general" posters and the only forums that have been active over the last several months are the specifically niche-oriented ones, so I'll definitely focus on those. Your post has made me realize that I don't need to put all my "great new ideas" out there at once. I basically want to be sure that anyone wanting to post on a niche-related subject doesn't have to wonder, "Now, where do I post this?"
[edited by: Beagle at 2:22 pm (utc) on July 23, 2007]
