Why did you decide to start a forum?

Had a popular programming site. It needed a forum so I hacked up a Frontpage form submission webbot to turn it into a threaded discussion in each article or code project we added to the site. Soon I discovered that the site needed a general discussion forum so I installed Matt Wrights wwwboard. A year or so and almost a million posts later I blew it up and installed UBB.

Didn't have the time or inclination to create an import script for it. In all honesty I had hoped the site would die because I had moved on to other ventures. It didn't in fact it grew bigger than before. In 1998 after 2 years and another 1M+ posts my host shut me down due to overage on bandwidth and resources. I already had the move to dedicated servers in my office planned so this hastened the move. Unfortunately, the host, Communitech, more on them later, refused to give me access to the files so those posts were also lost.

Since I was starting fresh yet again and because UBB with flatfiles couldn't handle the traffic very well I installed wwwthreads. In 2000 the site was more popular than ever and my main competition was creating a custom forum software for his site. Not to be left out I jumped in the EZ board discussions and was first to test the wwwthreads importer. This forum software some of you might have heard of. vBulletin. I imported my wwwthreads forum which at the time had close to a million posts. After the second test import the forum db crashed so again I had to do a unscheduled software change as well as put a new server online to handle the traffic. I also split the main site and forum.

Back to Communitech. In 2004 the owner and one of his buddies started a company called iNet Interactive. Shortly after I was contacted by the same person that basically told me to go hell to get my files back asking me if I wanted to sell the forum and a new start up forum I created a few months earlier. I recognized the name and when we went into negotiations I kept in mind what happened.

Short anecdote on that site. In the vbulletin million post thread you'll see a discussion started by Floris asking why it took so long to post in that thread. It was one of the first over 1M vbulletin installs. John's was first. He was familiar with the site and was a member. I explained that had had been a big board 3 times and I waited until I was sure I didn't have anything catastrophic happen again.

After that I started an off topic forum and sold it. A computer help site which I sold and later reacquired the domain after the buyer let it expire 3 years later. Then a few more which I sold. Now I have 4 left and one is about to be sold and another I have been asked about, but, am not ready to sell. I have a 3 more communities that I am nurturing along. I tell myself I'm done. Yet I have a couple ideas for new forums in my head now. I guess you could call me an addict.

I was kicked out of a clan a few years back. Me and my buddies needed a place to post our troop movements for Ogame. Ogame was a soul sucker, so after a while we all gave it up and went to Sacred 2 when it came out, where we have been roosting ever since.



gogo

P.s. Lisa, I like that religion. Complimentary cookies on weekends?

It all started when a family member introduced me to "Proboards". I helped him put together his free forum and it got pretty popular, it was a gaming site, which we later moved to IPB. Long dead now.

Anyway, I was never a 'real' member there, I had access to his account, that was that. The secret admin.. I learnt and learnt, Proboards templating system is very very basic, you have to hotlink images from an image host (back then we used photobucket, when it had unlimited bandwidth). To create a somewhat decent layout you really needed some coding skills, I was around 13 or 14, didn't posess those skills but I vowed to learn.

Around the same time I joined my first ever forum, it was a General Discussion forum called "Parlancia". I was a member for around 3 years and I always joke that "The first forum I ever joined I ended up owning".

The site was not about any one thing, and we had lots of fun, the site was very much filled with juveniles and teenagers, "f**k the rules" type people. I was temporarily banned a few times and then suddenly the owner upped and closed the site. Myself and a friend took it upon ourselves to email the owner, offering to take it off his hands but explained that we could not give him anything for it, nor did he want anything for it. It was very much a forum run for teenagers, by teenagers.. the maximum age was around 19.. 20, and that was the admin. Myself and my friend were of some of the more outspoken members, we were very controversial choices to take over the forum, some members left, the good ones stayed.

Anyway, when we took it on it was on a .co.uk domain, had around 80,000 posts already, was around a year old, ran vBulletin and we were thrown into the deep end. We knew nothing about hosting, licensing, and I only knew rudimentary code I'd learnt. I borrowed the money for the vBulletin license from my parents, he paid for some hosting and we restored the database (with a lot of hardship and help) and we got the site back online.

2 years later we had gone through a lot of posts, a lot of months hosting, a vBulletin leased license (remember those guys?) and were on our first semi dedicated server, and a new vBulletin (4?) owned license.. Anyway, my friend and co-owner had some financial difficulties and by this point I was paying for everything. We made the difficult decision to sell it, and that was that.. From 80,000 posts to just shy of 200k (I think it was closer to 180k..).

I did say in our announcement to our members that we were done with forums, but a year or so later I had started another forum, and then another, then another. Some failed, some have succeeded, some have been sold, others archived.. or merged into another of my forums..

Oh, and Parlancia still exists

I get emails from Parlancia all the time. Getting rather annoying. As I recall, I didn't get those "Come back" emails when you ran it.

Plus, the skin was better when you ran it. Didn't you run a contest using my points mod or something?

I wrote those emails, but no, I ran it once every 6 months I think, then disabled it otherwise it does.. well, this.

Yes, and yes

Seems they still have the points system installed, Ryan.

Also, if I recall correctly, if you log in then the mod thinks you're active and doesn't consider you inactive for x days, then doesnt email you for x days after that. Been a long time since I touched a vB install as modified as that one.

They do? Hmm... will have to take a second look.

Also, I know about the login thing... I did the other day. And unchecked the "Receive Emails from Administrators" option, so maybe they'll stop.

I'll go back when I'm good and ready, dammit.

EDIT: Nah, don't think they are. Can't get to the Leaders page.

My forum quest began when I started a paintball team (which later went semi-pro) and heard of a forum called PBNation for ballers, I had never been on a forum before, messed with it a bit and I had our appointed manager look into making a forum which she did thru forumer. After I left the team I got into 4wheeling and decided to have my own forum cuz for some dumb reason I figured mine would be the only one. It to was on forumer and after a bit it got old and next to zero members. Years later I started my now dead parrot forum (dead cuz I lack the time to fool with it). Now I have a forum for my gf's flower ahop but the forum isn't intended to get heavy use nor are we building the site around the forum, it is mostly yhe need for Nexus. I still spend a little time when I can here, IPS, and a catfishing forum.

Began When I was a member of another forum, and the current administration of that site was acting oppressive towards the members. I created a site for people to escape to...worked great till we managed to overthrow the admins on the other site, then my site closed down due to lack of activity. oh well.

Well mine is a not yet finished GED forum. I am studying to get my GED and there really isn't a forum where people can go for like study buddies and what not.. So am making one.

I started mine just for fun five years ago. After beginning evening school I used it as a platform for talking about exercises, schools, changing education materials and although I finished evening school 2 years ago, I use it for those started evening school after me ‚

I decided to start my new forum for a number of reasons, mainly because of my interest in the subject and how I want to learn myself. I knew quite a bit already but with the forum I could help others whilst they help me

I created my current forum because I love forums and already knew a great deal about them, I wanted to help other forum admins out so I started AF

In terms of the current forum I am running, I wanted back in on the game It’d been about 3 years since I closed down my previous forum and in the meantime, whilst I’d still hung around on some other sites purely as a user I hadn’t missed it one bit. Earlier this year though, I started getting that feeling again, I am sure most of you know it, the desire to start from scratch and build a new community and a good opportunity presented itself when someone I knew with a relatively successful content website was hosting a free forum attached to it- I offered to come on board and set up something with a little more control and customisability- it helped that I had an interest in the subject and topic of the website but honestly, I just wanted to build a forum again in a niche I knew had potential. It’s been fun so far and having got everything in place the next stage will be working on converting some of the much heavier traffic our content website gets into forum visitors. Right now the majority of visitors land right in the middle of a content page and miss the sole link to the forum we have in the header.


Previously my foray into forums has always been via interest in the topic rather than pure desire to just build a successful community, though with some projects I have enjoyed success, others have withered and died. I’ve not let saturation stop me either, in fact the most successful community I built started out from scratch amidst some much larger, more successful communities but progressed over the stage of three or four years to dominate all of them.


I don’t really have such competition with my current community, but with such a great foundation of content and traffic already established I am certainly hoping we can build something huge and filled to the brim with great discussions. That’s why I decided to start a forum again, hehe.

Oh, this is a good one! To make a long story short, I had been staff on multiple sites and posted all my work on these sites. One by one, they were all closing shop and I lost a lot of my work (guides/tutorials). So after the last site had gotten hacked, I figured "might as well store my stuff on my own site". By then I had a fairly large following so once I opened my doors I had a few hundred people registered on the site. I posted all of my stuff, my friends posted theirs, and we just sat, chilled, and helped those that came across our site.

I then started getting into promoting the site and what do you know...it took off. So much so that it took a hobby I loved and turned it into a job essentially I still enjoy the people that come around the site but after focusing so much on how to run a website, I lost focus and interest in what got me going with the site. So now my focus is on trying to optimize the content on my site that my members post so their posts can gain traffic. They all love having a popular thread so it's fun seeing them get excited when I've helped bring a bunch of traffic to their threads

I was a member of several other forums and really liked them, but wanted to do more, do things better and different.

So my only option was to start my own, and I've loved every minute.

I had been a member of another forum, however the administrator was a douche where if he said the sky was green and you didn't agree with him you would be permanently banned.

I had just walked out of hospital for the first time since dislocating my neck knowing my dreams of playing sport for my country were over however wanted to remain in the sporting realm of things and so started my own sport site which is still going and is about to hit it's seventh year. We have been hacked a few times and dropped from 1.5million posts to zero when my webhoster crashed and disappeared without warning.

I get into sites because of interest. If I go to a site I normally visit because of the topic but I am a material person and if I don't like the look of the website I will not register and will not return to it.

I started a forum to see if I could find people to help me solve a problem. I thought it would never grow past a couple of hundred members. I was wrong, it grew on it's own but became something different than I intended.