Forum Moderators: phranque
I searched at google and found a number of companies offering free boards. But none of them pointed to real examples so I could see what they looked like. They just want you to sign up sight unseen.
My questions are:
1. How do you find a good one?
2. I expect ads, but would not be interested in doing this if there were pop-up ads.
3. Has anyone set-up a message board for their website and successfuly left in unmonitored? Just running on its own?
I tried a message board when I only had a couple dozen visitors a day and it was easy to set-up but just didn't get used. Now I have thousands of visitors a day and I think they could really use one.
Thanks for any direction you can give, Peter
Has anyone set-up a message board for their website and successfuly left in unmonitored? Just running on its own?
This can become dangerous pretty fast. Unmonitored message boards tend to quickly become spamfests. At the very least you (or someone) will need to monitor the boards for that. Then there are all kinds of other user issues surrounding unmoderated boards (flame wars, trolls, "this company sucks" posts, etc). And there should be someone there to post replies to newbies intros and questions. Nothing is worse that a dead message board, and when new visitors find an empty message board, they will head to the next competitor's message boards instead.
To start growing communities, you also need a good reason for visitors to want to go to your message boards, and more importantly, stick around. It seems like every website has a message board these days, so you will need to provide the incentive for visitors to go to your boards, as opposed to those of a competing site.
As for free boards, all the ones I think of offhand do have pop-ups along with banner ads as part of the exchange for having the boards (and bandwidth) remotely hosted. Someone else might know of somewhere you can do this.
There are free message boards you can install on your own site if your server is set up for it. phpbb is one good free message board that comes to mind, but I am sure there are others.
Here is another thread you might find useful about starting off a new message board. [webmasterworld.com]
Good luck!
Very discouraging in some ways. On the other hand I certainly have the traffic to support one and since most visitors return to my site many times a week that would work nicely with a forum.
The maintenance required is the scary part, but now I understand what the monitors are for at the forums I use. Recruited.
I get so many offers from people wanting to help with my website... I could put them to work!
The biggest issure remaining at the moment is the pop-up ads.
Thanks! Peter
