Nowadays, if you want to create a forum, basically you have to work very, very, hard. Two years ago, it was hard, but much easier than now, in my opinion.
Here are some reasons:
1. Too many people have started to create a forum. Look, there are now so many services like Forumer, InvisionFree, etc, that people have started to sell scripts that create free forum hosts. That basically means that any person in the world, regardless of technical knowledge, can create a forum. That’s a low entry barrier. A VERY low entry barrier. That means you have lots of competition.
2. Promoting a forum is hard. Even if your forum has advertisements on many sites, it’s very hard to get people want to register, let alone post, on your websites. Take Daniweb for instance. Currently, it has 1691 (10 members and 1681 guests) online. That’s a very low member-to-guest ratio. Even though Daniweb has many advertisements on various sites (I see many on Krazy Letter through Google AdSense/AdWords, for example), Not many people are going onto the website and posting. Many are just reading. If you don’t have many posts, people might not even read. Maybe you are aiming to earn money, but the goal is to build a community. Plus, it’s hard to generate more money from visitors that you pay for by buying ads.
Now, I’ve mentioned enough bad things about creating new forums. Let me give you some reasons to start a forum, or good conditions to start a forum.
1. DO start a forum, if you can use it as a helpful tool for a gaming clan, friends group, or something else. Why use some service like MySpace when you can create your own forum and earn money while you are at it?
2. DO start a forum if you have an existing website with many users, you can promote the forum and get additional traffic, that being mutually beneficial to both your visitors, which can discuss the topic your website is about, and you, so you can get to know about your visitors.
I hope this has been helpful; I’ll try to post more things as we go along. Post any comments you have, if you have found this helpful or unhelpful; if you agree or disagree.
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3. Don’t make a forum if you have no clue how to run one. Running a forum isn’t as easy as it looks and you need technical expertise. You’ll need to know how to work FTP, how to CHMOD, etc.
Unless of course you want to waste time on one of those poser forums at invisionfree.com, etc.
Still, those things are another reason why people who start forums have so much competition; there are so many bad forums on the web, that some people don’t sign up for forums much anymore.
By the way, if you have PHPSuExec installed, then you don’t need to learn to CHMOD, the default of 644 should be enough.
If you don’t know how to work FTP, then there’s a bit more to learn before you can even start a website.
March 14, 2006
CHMODing files is the least of your worries when starting a forum. That’s the easy part. The hard part comes in other misc gritty work like setting up forums, handling bugs, and in marketing.
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