Implementing a Message Board

[killua]

We would like to implement a Forum/Message Board on one of our newest website. Is there any guidelines to follow before making a message board, such as average visitors per day? If so, how many average visitors should I have per day to be able to successfully establish a community message board, and why?

[John Scott]

I don't think the number of visitors matters that much. I know message boards that get thousands of visitors per day, but are dead because posts do not get replied to.

[Dom]

I totally agree with John in that I think you could start get a really busy forum off the ground with very few visitors. It would depend as much on what your subject is, how much of an incentive to join in there is, how easy it is to get posting and the general atmosphere your board conveys to new visitors.

If you have a group of friends/colleagues (at least 5 I'd say) then you can get things started quite nicely and create the all important impression of activity straight away - nobody wants to join a dead forum. There are lots of paid posting places around these days but personally I wouldn't want to use them unless the forum's subject was very broad (good luck getting relevant posts on say an antiques forum).

If you don't have a reasonable number of people who can help get the forum off the ground then it will be a lot harder, but is still doable. Provide lots of interesting and unique points of discussion and the registrations will follow. Turn those registrations into avid posters and it things could snowball very nicely.

I launched a forum about 6 months ago now on a fairly niche subject with no posters other than myself. Until very recently registrations and new posts were few and far between but in the past couple of months the combination of a nice ranking in Google and all of my initial hard work and perseverence has meant things have started to pick up to the point where I'm now getting 40 or so posts a day. Granted that's still a small amount but the way I see it, 0-40 posts a day is as big a step as 40-300+ and in another 6 months I see no reason why it won't be at that level.

[killua]

Do you mean, it's OK to implement a Forum even if you only get 10-20 average visitors a day? If that is the case, http://www.websitegoodies.com/article/36 then this article is not true?

[Ferre]

Originally Posted by killua

Do you mean, it's OK to implement a Forum even if you only get 10-20 average visitors a day? If that is the case, http://www.websitegoodies.com/article/36 then this article is not true?

From that article;

Your site should be getting at least 1,000 unique visitors per day before you even launch. Don't open it up prematurely because it can make your site look uninhabited if no one posts.

That's nonsense.

They are right to say that only a % of the visitors to a website will also follow the link to the forums, not everyone is interested in forums but about 1/3 of your visitors do.

A forum, when aimed at the right niche can be a huge magnet for traffic, even for sites that do not have much traffic, a forum has the potential to boost traffic but as I said, it all depends of the niche.

[Dom]

Having lots of visitors would undoubtedly help. The more visitors, the more registrations and then posts you can expect. I completely disagree with their suggestion that you have to have 1,000 uniques a day to start a forum (you plainly don't) but I wouldn't expect a forum with only 20 visitors a day to have much luck getting started unless you can get a group of people to kick things off from day one.

[reteep]

It doesn't have to be day one because it probably takes time until you move up in the SearchEngines, too, but you should be quick about making fake accounts and fake posts there, otherwise noone will ever participate.

Here's also a useful hack for vB: http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showt...hreadid=115661