Forum or No Forum

[brownbinman]

Hi all

im not sure if this thread belows here but hey

I work for a large company (cant say who), working on their website. I was wondering lately how to promote us better on the web.

I was thinking about adding a forum onto the site. The purpose of this would be to answer any technical questions, give advice etc.

How much work is involved in developing and maintaining a forum. As our web team is quite small for such a large and well known name, im wondering if additional resources might be needed to maintain it.

Any thoughts or advice will be very welcome

Thanks

The Bin Man

[achieve]

There's lots of different forum software out there - some of which are opensource and thus free. Also easy very easy to setup. However, if you wish to do some cutomisation to the forum, then that is where the work/time is involved. As far as I'm concerned, I think forums are a great idea, but with one main proviso - they need to be used - there's nothing worse than visiting a forum, to see that there hasn'r been a post in 2 months! Also bear in mind, that forums are places where hackers like to hang out, and be prepared to update your forum software when necessary.

[MayaLocke]

Forums are great community building tools but they require effort to get them off the ground and regular attention. In the long run they really can build a customer base that helps each other but its not a "quick fix".

[link8r]

There's lots of different forum software out there - some of which are opensource and thus free. Also easy very easy to setup. However, if you wish to do some cutomisation to the forum, then that is where the work/time is involved. As far as I'm concerned, I think forums are a great idea, but with one main proviso - they need to be used - there's nothing worse than visiting a forum, to see that there hasn'r been a post in 2 months! Also bear in mind, that forums are places where hackers like to hang out, and be prepared to update your forum software when necessary.

Just got to catch you there Achieve - OpenSource doesn't mean it's free. OpenSource means that the source code is made open to a community of the owners description. There are many OpenSource models and licences, many cahrge for commercial use. A very common misconception is that MySQL is free - it's only (well used to be) free for home/personal, education reasons - commercial projects have to buy a licence.

[StuartC]

Blueface.ie have done a great job on this. Their service can be tricky for people with no techy skills whatsoever id say. They set up a forum on their site dealing with every issue or query for the product.

[gbonnet]

Blueface.ie have done a great job on this. Their service can be tricky for people with no techy skills whatsoever id say. They set up a forum on their site dealing with every issue or query for the product.

Thanks!

We're not what I would call a 'large company' though.

Maintaining our forum is not too much work to be honest, there are less than 10 messages / day

It's very useful to help customers and to answer the questions of potential customers.
That's good for SEO too, since that involves a lot of relevant content around our areas of interest.

One of the point you must be careful with your forum is spammy registrations and spams in general ... they are a pain in the bum.

We use a vBulletin board and are very happy with it. I find it easier to manage than the phpBB board we use for mysipswitch.

[defeated]

One of the point you must be careful with your forum is spammy registrations and spams in general ... they are a pain in the bum.

I used SMF (simple machines forum) software for our forum. We were hammered with spammers. I would wake up in the morning to porn pictures posted all over it. A lot of the spam was automated. In the end I got rid of the forum. I replaced it with a page to explain why we got rid of it. That page still gets a large volume of visits from the spam bots. This is 8 months later.

Having to clear spam several times a day is not my idea of fun. are phpbb and vBulletin any better? I'm thinking of starting another forum on a different site.

[gbonnet]

are phpbb and vBulletin any better?

I'm using both of them and since I moderate registrations I don't have any issue. Note that they are not massive forums so I only need to handle about 10 registrations per day.

Maybe once a month I authorize someone who intend to spam because his registration request looked genuine ...
The captcha really helped in preventing bots to register.

Then, I know they are plug ins for vBulletin that prevents spams within new posts (checks for keywords and picture names I think). I never tried though.

[defeated]

cheers. May give it another go so!

[Alan]

Having to clear spam several times a day is not my idea of fun. are phpbb and vBulletin any better? I'm thinking of starting another forum on a different site.

I found (even the most recent versions of) phpbb very spammy although I never checked to see if there were any plugins to minimize this. You can moderate registrations though still its a pain.

Never used Vbulletin although I always hear good reports about it.