rogerd - 2:55 am on May 27, 2004 (gmt 0)

Good questions, Webwork. In my opening post, I used the new Community Building forum as an analog to what many of us face in launching forums on our own (or client) sites. I guess it's fair to get a progress report.

Overall, we're pretty lucky to be housed within WebmasterWorld since we have some major advantages many forums lack:
- high site traffic and large existing member base
- stable and secure infrastructure (BestBBS)
- great mod & admin support team (I can sleep without worrying that the spammers are lying in wait!)

In launching a new, independent forum I undoubtedly would have had to spend many hours installing software, configuring it, customizing it (appearance, SEO characteristics, etc.). None of this was needed here, and due to the established nature of the entire site, I didn't feel pressure to create lots of posts to avoid an empty look.

As far as promotion, we got a nice home page thread shortly after the launch... That's all it will take for now. Members will continue to discover it on the "recent posts" lists, and if history is any indication we'll gradually develop off-site referrals as we build a body of forum-issue and community building content. I did consider spamming all the other forums here with URL drops to the new forum, but that would have been bad form. ;)

The heavy lifting of this launch has been done by the members of WebmasterWorld - with close to 500 posts in less than two weeks, we're off to a brisk start for a specialized topic.

In short, although launching a forum here does take a bit of effort (not just on the mod's part but by Brett, too), it doesn't compare with starting from scratch on your own site from a labor or stress standpoint. Still, it's building a new community and delivers the same kind of psychic rewards.