Re: New Forums
If you are going to go for a forum then try to be specific to begin with otherwise you might find yourself biting off more than you can chew. Too many categories and options can confuse the average net surfer and you can end up with a sparse looking forum full of subforums but few threads and posts.
Advertising and promotion is a must if you want a successful site but again, this takes time and patience - you can't just advertise anywhere and often other sites where you post your link in your sig or wherever have a no-follow tag in the code which means you get no linkbacks - people might visit by clicking but the search engines won't pick up on it and it's them you want to attract the most so that you feature highly in the SERPS (search engine result pages).
As Tsuyu said, coughing up the dollars for the better software is a must - free forums are all very well but often they are limited in many areas. We use VBulletin, primarily, (although I do have a Drupal forum of my own as well which is free), and it comes with a vast array of plug-ins, options and security which free forums don't always have. Plus a free forum can sometimes be on the back of another site so in order to access your area people have to trawl through other places to find it. You also may have little to no control over the advertisments whereas with VBulletin you can customise them in order to make money off them, which helps with the costs.
Basically, if you want a Vbulletin licence there are two types - owned and leased. If you own a licence it'll cost you $180.00 (not including any extra taxes such as VAT) and you get a years' worth of free updates. You get the software indefinitely plus full online support when you need it - but you need to pay $60 per year thereafter if you want to continue to receive updates (highly recommended). A leased licence costs $100.00 and is only available for 1 year, so you need to renew it or remove all software from your site.
If you have time and patience, a forum can be very rewarding and good fun - but you need to be prepared to put the work in and if you can't, you need to find people you can trust to appoint as moderators/staff. Too often someone will start a forum and the first people to sign up get asked to be staff without even knowing if they are any good - or they pick their best friends for the job and find they can't control what they do without falling out. But if you just want a forum for kicks and you're not too fussed about it being well-known or successful - or you don't want to make money off it - then no need to go for VBulletin. Try Drupal (even though it takes a bit of getting used to) or SMF - you'll still get traffic and visitors so with any luck, word of mouth will help encourage more people to sign up and talk about your forum in other places.
