putting a forum on site

[cadman]

Hello all,

I am in the process of creating a blog and would like to incorporate a forum like the one on this site. When i looked at the wordpress site, I didn't see anything about it anywhere-possible overlook. Does the forum option come with wordpress or does it need to be installed from another site and in either situation, is it free or does it need to be purchased.

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

cadman

[Antiventurecapital]

This forum is a vBulletin which costs about $85/year to license. You can get a phpBB board for free to begin with.

Have you checked to see if there are other CAD forums in existence? If there are you may have a difficult time attracting users. For every board with a critical mass of regs, there are 1000 with tumbleweeds blowing through their subforums.

[John Wesley]

I've used phpBB for a blog network I organized and so far it seems to work really well. You might want to think about waiting until your blog has some traffic before you set up a forum. A forum without any users is pretty lame.

[trekr5]

There is a plugin for wordpress that when installed creates a forum on your blog

see here: Yellow Swordfish » Simple Forum WordPress Plugin

[tobyhede]

I've always liked the look of: Vanilla. Really nice, clean interface.

[andrew]

Yeah I use vanilla and it's really nice. It's a bit different from the mainstream forums, but once you get it all set up how you like it it's really nice.

[Gazzali]

Originally Posted by cadman

Hello all,

I am in the process of creating a blog and would like to incorporate a forum like the one on this site. When i looked at the wordpress site, I didn't see anything about it anywhere-possible overlook. Does the forum option come with wordpress or does it need to be installed from another site and in either situation, is it free or does it need to be purchased.

Any help or suggestions are greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

cadman

hi there

i am happy that you have the vibrancy of starting a forum. In my opinion traffic is the first step. As the traffic builds up you can loop them with your forum.

I want to give myself for 2 years and then i may try the forum thing. In any case check out with others for a 2nd opinion.

If you want to build traffic you can read Beneficial Learning for Outstanding Generation

all the best
gazzali

[nozbe]

I'm using PunBB for my Nozbe and HitRSS forums and it works great for me.

It's a lot "lighter" than Vbulletin or PHPBB.. it may not have that many features... but it's more than enough to what I need... and the setup is REALLY easy...

[AndrewJ]

Yeah nobody wants to join an empty forum so think about how you can entice people to join early.
There are of course many forum posting services available where you pay people to populate your forum but this method is not for everyone.

Andrew

[nvictor]

I still don't know why Joel Spolsky's forums work so well. It's basically a simple, clean, RSS enabled forum [which I regret Stevepavlina's forum doesn't have]. It also have lots of down sides and the first one is that the number of thread shown is limited, as new ones add, old ones disappear.

Somebody has made an open source out of it: SourceForge.net: Fruit Show

The author website is Crazyontap

I
- am a creative darkworker
- see myself and people who have the same belief in an interesting job position
- have found a PHP developer to help me with my job board project
- getting all the help that I need on Stevepavlina.com's forums
- want you to get paid for your time spent on Internet here

[da1prophet]

I've just started adding a forum to my website, and I'm using PHPBB. Dreamhost has one click installation of it, and there's a ton of mods and other enhancements available online. I agree that there's nothing worse than an empty forum (which mine is at the moment) so if you're just starting a site you might want to develop your traffic first.

Whatever you use, make sure that they offer a good system for preventing spam posts and/or registrations. I had a problem with that and have added a couple of simple changes--like making new members verify their email address. I still get a few spambots registering every day, but since they don't use real emails they can't post and its easy to go through and delete them.

[Whatsnext]

when I first started I was using phpBB2, and now I upgraded to phpBB3 and I must say phpBB3 is very good.

What I love about phpBB, is how you can just customize the hell out of it, vBulletin, IPB... you can also do the same, but with phpBB (at least to me) the sky is the limit... plus its free.
Just try it out on this host : free forum hosting