Createing a forum.
 

Me and my friend are going to make an anime/game/whatever ( :p ) forum later today. does anyone have any tips for us?

Don't use proboard (or anything similar) if you want people to take you seriously.

we were planing on useing Invisionfree. we dont have money to pay for professional hosting.

You might want to think about switching over to something like vB when you get the money then.

I will. when i get money. ^_^ any other ideas?

Think about this: Why would anyone come to your site? I don't mean to be rude, what I mean to do is to make you consider the concept of content. It's most likely just going to be you, your staff, and a few buddies at first. That could be as many as 30 people if you're lucky. The rest you will need to draw in somehow. What can you offer?

A fundamental question that you have to ask, what so special about it? A board on gaming, anime or just about any topics out there is going to be pretty a-typical, unless you are just going to keep it in between acquaintance, there really isn't any good reason to go out and make a small one that is just going to die soon enough. Unless you have a specific attraction either from a main site that you actively maintain, special property like Gaia, or a large originally established user base. Its pretty pointless to make a new one when you have access to already established forum, quite frankly.

Thats what i thought. i still want to give it a try. we hope to have enough intresting stuff that people want to join.

I don't think properly spelled words will be a large selling point in your forum.

Most likely not. ^_^; Good thing i normally spell check everything before i post it. (and thats probably why i cant spell anything...)

How did GFF become so popular anyway? By the time I discovered the site, it was already thriving, so it's hard to tell how it originally got that way.

Cool. Make sure you tell me when it's up so I can hax it with some button pushing.

Also, I think there's enough forums in the world. There are enough imageboards in the world, which is why EleoChan is a failure. (See sig). Seriously, what do you have to offer that no other gaming/anime site does?

After a while they made people register in order to download the FFVII OST four hundred times over. "Can't get enough! Might as well post about FFVII while I'm waiting for it to download again! Who here likes FFVII? WHOA YOU DO? Best friends!"

I wonder if all these members are ex-members of Squaresound forums.

janus zeal - best of luck with your forums!

It's funny 'cause it's kinda true - or plausible at least. I think that Janus Zeal may have just figured out what s/he needs to do to popularise these new forums. Increment the number of the soundtrack in question to something greater than "X", and the same strategy would pretty much work right now.

Infernal Monkey's explanation almost makes sense except that he just described all the people that we chase out of the forums for being dumb.

I wonder how IcyHot or whats-her-name is doing.

If you will continue with making a forum, please don't inconvenience your members by using ezboard. Our anime club uses it, and it's full of slutty "Mate1" popups and ads entwined and integrated between, above and over posts.

The large majority gets driven out, but a few tough it out and usually grow up to be decent members. The larger your user base is, the higher the chance of getting better members. You just have to put up with a lot of shit for awhile.

Assuming this place works like the rest of the internet.

I think Bobo should just impliment a 30 post count in order to take advantage of My Stuff forums. You'd be suprised how many people wouldn't post 30 times to access My Stuff, but then again, you shouldn't be.

I got my forum running awhile ago useing invision power. it's alright but were still working things out and it's taken about 3 months and were still trying to get members. and using invisionfree is not that good of an idea. it takes hours of searching and chances of getting a forum with lots of members are hard to get. It will start off rocky but if you hold out Vampiro is right.

You know, I almost thought the title of this thread was 'Catering to a Forum'. How would you do that?

By providing the user base what they want, whether it be a certain feature or a design change.

That's what happens now. I'm prepared to believe that standards were somewhat lower in the early days, until the first core group of members started to find their identities. By that point its likely that the place had a good-sized userbase already.

I was hoping for hogies served over the net. :(

We're half way there if the "/pizza" command is any indication.

If you're using Invision, then you can get an old (but free) version of IPB here.

Wouldn't it kick ass if you could torrent food? :edgartpg:

Chances are if you're using Invision AND having it hosted on their public servers, it's not gonna go anywhere. Sorry.

Harsh but true. I only know one InvisionFree forum that is a success, and that's because it is a community devoted to a game franchise that doesn't have much in the way of other (English) communities. In other words, it has something unique to offer. If they don't have that, most InvisionFree forusm do tend to wither on the vine.

I will see. i want to reply to about 5 diffrent posts here, but im to lazy. :/

Thanks for the tips. i hope it works out. if not, oh well, i still have GFF. ^_^

I'm going to be honest: your forum has no chance to attract more than twenty users, and half of that userbase will probably consist of real-life friends.

It doesn't seem that you have any idea about where you want to go with this. ''Anime/game/whatever'' message boards are dime a dozen. Whether you use free software or pay for vBulletin does not matter, if you don't have anything to offer to your members.

These forums only exist because of Gamingforce Audio, and because they are among the relatively few forums that specialize in VGM. You can't just build a message board out of nothing and expect people to register and post. Sorry. If you make the forum, it will die because of inactivity in a couple of months.

Interesting stuff? Like what, for instance? Do you have any concrete plans?

I don't think that's entirely true, but you have a point.

Like any site that's new and doesn't necessarily pull in users, part of the key to making it grow is to let it grow, but while at the same time seeing that it doesn't die. EleoChan.org isn't massively popular, but it has grown in popularity since I reopened it back in what, April, and from what I've seen it is continuing to grow. But slowly. The difference between bandwidth usage last month and this month is about ~50MB a day. Average hits and visits has increased too, even if by a small amount. I'm up against a massive number of imageboards but if hits keep increasing then it's all good. Until I have to find a dedicated server and pay expenses. That's going to suck ass.

But anyway, the good thing is EleoChan isn't really slowing down or dying at the moment, even if its accelerating at a low rate. And part of the key to this was doing my best to keep it alive when it was getting hardly any hits a day while at the same time not spreading any visitors too thin with more boards than they cared to visit.

I guess a regular forum is different because there's no naked ladies and animated gifs to look at, though, so it would be more difficult, but if you offer up something even remotely desirable like mp3s then you can get more hits. And the Internet only cares about what they can download or what they can fap to.