Starting a forum

I operate a financial trading site, mainly educational, and am considering starting a forum to increase traffic. Based mainly on about thirty five or so reference articles, steadily, traffic is almost all organic and has been quite modest for a couple years now.

Questions are:
- how to jump start from dead; getting the initial threads going
- does the moderator really need to be knowledgeable in areas of posts being made OR is the role mainly to keep out spammers/vulgar posts/administer back end, etc. (topics could require extensive & in depth skills and knowledge)
- what advantage does the forum still offer over blogging, given that the site is well established (yet without a skeletal forum)
- would this be the time to move out of a VPS shared hosting environment and on to something more robust?

Either wiat for users to find the forum, or start promoting it ina a big way. You can use anything from mailing lists, to online adds, to newspaper adds, or anyhting else, jsut get the URL out there.


This depends on the forum, and what sort of "power" you want to moderators to have. Unfortuantly the answer to this question is "whatever works for you".


Forum and bog sites are completely different things, and can't be compared like that. A blog is made to be a once-sided converstation, with the writer putitng their ideas out there, and receiving a few comments. A forum is where all users can talk about whatever topic it is, and all users can reply and add to any converstations. The only consideration is how much you want your visitors to be able to do


Most times this won't be needed. The best way to check this is to keep an eye on how much load your VPS is under. If it gets to strained, then look at upgrading.

thanks Catacaustic


Now I'm starting to wonder what may be involved in development, with so much to be done.

vBulletin, for example, is it a complete content management?
What's included vs what needs to be done as far as database design and scripting, etc.

Do these forum solutions come basically with everything but forming the database connections/validations/page tagging/styling (css)? Is there such a thing?

ADDED: vbulletin rundown

vBullitin is a good choice for a forum, but they have got a long way to go befor they are a CMS that's even a shade of what Wordpress can do. I've used the CMS Adn blog functionality that vBullitin offers, and it's really not intuative for publishing anything. Iv'e had the clients that have asked for that come back with all sorts of issues.

As far as "Do these forum solutions come basically with everything", well, yes they do. BUT always look through the specifications to make sure that it can do what you want it to before you start building it up.

Between Hiker and myself we've removed 25 unrelated posts from this thread in the past week. Once the actual discussion is done can the OP please close this thread or let one of us know and we'll do so. This thread is apparently a magnet for nonsense.