Forums are tough to go viral ... it's a different kind of beast than the usual "viral" stuff. What makes a forum work is the community of members. Grow (and nurture!) that membership first and take heed of what they like and want as far as the OPERATION of the forum. Maintain a sensible and even handed moderation because human beings, though generally nice and respectful, can get messy at times. :)

As for points 4 and 5 and the queries following, that will all depend in the community that is established. Know your members first, then you can make those decisions.

Thanks Tangor.

A little more detail: the vast majority of the current and future forum members (99%+) are from a Facebook Group and understand and enjoy (and sometimes adore) the Facebook UI.

Many have said they find the forum "complicated" but, on being questioned (supportively), they cannot be more explicit than that.

If anything, the fact that you can only post - as opposed to post / comment / sub-comment which you can on FB Groups - suggests (to me) that phpBB3 is simpler rather than being more complicated.

So I am (currently) assuming they might actually mean only that they find the phpBB3 UI unfamiliar.

Given the above, I am confident that the more frequently they use the forum, the more familiar it will become and the less "complicated" they will find it.

Hence my need to introduce multiple magnets to attract as many people as possible to reuse the forum as often as possible.

The Facebook Group membership is currently over 48,000.

Then you might want to market the SIMPLICITY of the forum.

"The facts, ma'am. Only the facts." (if not obvious, a reference to the direct methods of Jack Webb as Joe Friday on the tv series Dragnet)

Remark that "as much as we love facebook the interface allows to many side tracks that focusing on a specific topic is difficult. What looks easy in fb is actually a mess of competition which dilutes a conversation."

Good luck with your endeavor, here is some of my suggestions, some of them could be implemented right away

1. Have a Twitter account where you can post links to the hottest discusiions going on.

2. Write a full guide on how to navigate the forums properly

3. Install Tapatalk

4. Allow users to upload photos easily

5. Create competition and offer neat prizes for the winners

6. Add a bunch of ready made avatars for users to use

7. Allow users to edit their posts freely

8. Make the user automatically subcsribe to the threads they participate in, because it is frustrating to miss new posts

Let me know if that works

3. Install Tapatalk

shudder....

I agree with Swanny007. Tapatalk is unnecessary if the forum's already mobile friendly.

Tapatalk only has one real advantage, and that's push notifications. There are a ton of reasons to not use it, from the admin viewpoint. But that's another topic altogether...

In my opinion, with PHBB3 it's prudent to not use too many mods on the forum. It can complicate updating the forum to a newer version. You might in the future have to do a manual update on individual files or find that the mods will not function after an update. Also, each mod you add to a forum could potentially introduce a compromise to the software, allowing it to be hacked at some future point.

I've been using phpBB for 15 years now (holy cow!) and the best advice I can give is to use as few mods/extensions as possible. I can't tell you how many times over the years mod/extension developers have vanished so as phpBB puts out updates it breaks the mods. What used to be called mods which are now called extensions in v3.1 are handled much better by the core phpBB installation but I hardly use any extensions. I use one to put the poster's info on the left side of the page instead of the right, and one extension to put in my Amazon affiliate link when people post Amazon links, that's it. I don't even recommend you use a different theme unless it's from a very active developer who has a good history of updating in a timely manner. I took the core phpBB but then added one extra .css file to tweak some colors to better fit my template. I did have to make one small tweak to a core file but generally you should stay away from tweaking core files.

My tips:
1) Use the Q&A CAPTCHA, it's by far the most effective one. Use 2-3 questions that aren't easily answered by using a favorite internet search engine.
2) There's absolutely no reason to "hack the UI" to make it more mobile friendly. Again, you're justing making updating phpBB that much harder.
3) Never use Tapatalk. I just recently heard of a push notification app that might be compatible, it's called Pushbullet.

As I said I've been running some forums since 2001 and I can honestly say it's extremely tough to get a forum to be viral. I never found that secret. In my niche the forum is still useful but it was more active 3-5 years ago. I feel that forums have kind of lost some of their appeal in general in the last few years. Even this forum is a lot less active now than it was 3-5 years ago.

I've tried the posting on Twitter daily to get people to the site, that was a total waste of time so I really cut back on that. I really don't do Facebook but I know that's where most people are. Good luck.

the best advice I can give is to use as few mods/extensions as possible.

That is standard advice for any software