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. :(