Building a Community Forum

by Freaky

We've seen user-input communications in various incarnations for years, from bulletin boards and newsgroups to mailing lists and forums.  I have been building communities for the vast part of a decade and have found success in building communities covering a wide range of subject matter from coffee and medical research to technology and hobby sites.  This simple guide will get you on your way to building your own community.

Choosing Your Subject

If you already have a website, your subject is probably obvious, but in either case it's important to pick a subject that's familiar, sparks interest, and is something you are passionate about that you think other people will talk about.

An example of a community that grew out of interest is one of the largest lockpicking enthusiasts' websites, LockPicking101.com.  This community began with local hackers expressing an interest in learning about lockpicking.  The forum provided a place for hacker/lockpicking enthusiasts to share informative tidbits they learned about lockpicking with each other.  Soon it became apparent that others were also interested in lockpicking and how locks worked.  The site recently celebrated its ten year anniversary!

Once you have your subject, research possible names for the community.  See what exists already as you don't want your site confused with someone else's site.  If you already have a site and you're creating a new domain name just for your forum, it's vital that you choose a memorable name for your community.  Consider keywords that are directly associated with your subject and your target demographic.  In addition, it's a necessity that you determine which title would be the most search-friendly.  Luckily there are many keyword research tools that can provide you with the pertinent and popular search words!

Select Your Software

There are quite a few web-based software solutions for your needs, the most popular being vBulletin and phpBB.  When selecting your forum software, it's important to select one that is updated and maintained.  Running software that isn't maintained can lead to hacked sites and servers.  Some hosting providers help install the software.  Others update the software for you, but if you're running your own services, it's on you to keep it up to date!

Once you make your selection and install it, plan on sticking with it for a while.  It's rather hard to migrate to different forum software, especially when the site grows.  CellPhoneHacks.com is one example of migrating from phpBB to vBulletin.  The site was run on phpBB for years, constantly being updated, so when it was migrated to vBulletin, the automated tools weren't as automated as we wanted and were riddled with errors that took a great deal of work to get running again.  Sometimes migration goes smoothly, other times it doesn't, so always have backups of your database and files!

Choose Main Topics of Discussion

A forum with too many sections and no posts is like a ghost town.  When visitors hit the site, seeing everything empty, they tend to press the back button because they feel their post won't get seen.  When selecting your main sections of discussion, start with a couple and make sure you get some great posts in the section, so people see they are active and the community is alive.  You can always add more as your community grows, but it's good to start with just a handful.  This was experienced firsthand with UndercoverFiles.com, a community for conspiracy and doomsday preparations.  As you can imagine, there are so many topics that could be covered, but we had too many at first and had to scale back and combine subjects.

Once your main subjects are created, you're going to want to seed your community.  Start by making some posts yourself and ask your friends to make a post or two and get involved!  Ideas for starter topics include rules and introduction topics.  Reach out to other sites that may want to get involved to help the site grow!  Remember you need that warm feeling that the site is alive and active.

Adapt to Your Audience

Your audience speaks and you will be able to see what's of interest to them and what they're talking about.  Even though you may start a forum with one person in mind, you may realize you actually attracted a different kind of user.  BaristaForums.com, which was previously EspressoForums.com, was intended to be a site for coffee lovers to talk about coffee.  Once traffic started coming to the site, we realized it was full of coffee shop owners and employees looking to grow their business, talk B2B, and learn about the latest tech in their industry.  The site was adapted and the caffeinated talk is still buzzing!  Keep your ear to the ground and adapt to your community.

Promote Your Community

Books have been written on promoting websites; the key thing is you need to promote your site, and you have a lot of tools and resources at your fingertips, including tons of blog posts and community sites like Webmaster World Forums which I first started out on.  Without spending any more money, you can research Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and start writing better posts that will attract more search engine traffic.

Don't spam other sites.  Remember, you're trying to build a community and you probably don't want people spamming your site, so make sure you don't spam other people's sites.  Many sites allow you to have signature tags and have link sections.  But the best kind of traffic isn't from one link, it's from a recommendation.  Start making friends and get involved in other communities and other sites by doing guest posts and writing great content.

We've promoted communities locally by printing flyers and business cards and posted at colleges, coffee shops, and other businesses to help drive traffic to the sites.  Make these flyers available to other users on the forum so they can help spread the word!  While some sites we've promoted via social media, others are promoted as paid advertisements on Google or banners on other websites.

Keep Your Community Clean

We've seen sites get obliterated by spam bots, so it's important to keep your forums clean, updated, and protected against the spam bots.  There are different methods you can try to keep spam out, including enabling CAPTCHA to stop automated registration and posts, but there are also third-party solutions like BlockScript which allows the webmaster to input a bit of code to check to see if the connection is made via proxies, known IPs of spam, or certain countries and then rejects the connection.

Your number one protection against spam is your own community users and forum administrators.  You will want to select a moderator or administrator to help keep the community clean, someone who is active in the community and has the free time to help keep it clean.  Some forum software allows users to report posts.  When enough users report a post, it is removed automatically and put under review.  Your moderators and administrators may move on to other things over time or get too busy to be as active as they were, so keep an open line of communication and be aware of what is needed.  You don't want to neglect your community.  It can easily be overtaken by spam.  At that point, it's best to shut it down or disable new posts if you want to keep the old content accessible to users as reference.