Making a surfer forum?

ecchi · 2010-04-08, 02:48 AM

Four things to note:
1: Most board surfers are just lurkers, you will need a hell of a lot of traffic to make this work. If you cannot feed it several hundred surfers a day from your other sites, wait until you can.
2: Remember you will have to post a lot yourself to start with, to chivvy on the genuine posters.
3: Keep a good eye on spam, and delete it instantly. Nothing kills a board faster than spam, people just go elsewhere. For the first few months, possibly longer, you are going to have to check it several times a day, every day. If you cannot do that (eg. you got a day job, your religion forbids you working certain days, you are planning a holiday within the next few months, etc.) you need a business partner to cover for you. Also note that the world does not all sleep at the same time, if you are one of those people who needs a solid 8 hours a night, you are going to need someone to check while you snore, or you will wake up to find your board full of spam for Russian rape sites!
4: Check that your server has a powerful enough kit to run a forum. The main thing you have to look at is the amount of processing a forum requires, not the bandwidth. A basic server cannot handle this, and one of my favourite boards died when it got popular and the regulars buggered off because each page load took too long due to the server not able to process quickly enough.

2010-04-08, 02:48 AM	#4
ecchi Banned Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: About to be evicted!!!! Posts: 4,082	Four things to note: 1: Most board surfers are just lurkers, you will need a hell of a lot of traffic to make this work. If you cannot feed it several hundred surfers a day from your other sites, wait until you can. 2: Remember you will have to post a lot yourself to start with, to chivvy on the genuine posters. 3: Keep a good eye on spam, and delete it instantly. Nothing kills a board faster than spam, people just go elsewhere. For the first few months, possibly longer, you are going to have to check it several times a day, every day. If you cannot do that (eg. you got a day job, your religion forbids you working certain days, you are planning a holiday within the next few months, etc.) you need a business partner to cover for you. Also note that the world does not all sleep at the same time, if you are one of those people who needs a solid 8 hours a night, you are going to need someone to check while you snore, or you will wake up to find your board full of spam for Russian rape sites! 4: Check that your server has a powerful enough kit to run a forum. The main thing you have to look at is the amount of processing a forum requires, not the bandwidth. A basic server cannot handle this, and one of my favourite boards died when it got popular and the regulars buggered off because each page load took too long due to the server not able to process quickly enough.