What makes a great forum?

I have seen many forums die in the past. There is no such things as secret for making forum flourish.

What in your opinion will make a forum right from birth make it an active and love one? I mean one with almost no contents and just a few posts.

Thanks
Neelesh

 

I'll go the corny option and say... the people!

 

Forums are made by members. They are the main component of a good forum. Moderation is also vital, cause a forum that is disorganized and full of spam is not attractive to anyone

 

I think a great forum comes with great people. If you are looking for a well traffic forum you should go for a online related forum niche. For sure most of your users are online most of the time

 

Nothing my friend.. I have a forum currently, got 22,000 posts and 500 people in the first month. Now it's almost the end of June and only 2,000 posts this month even though the board has 402,000+ posts and more than 4,000 members....

 

I saw some people making posting contest on their new forums. Maybe you should try that. But i don't know whether it works or not.

 

If you want a good forum you must have good administration..

 

A good forum is made by the people, people who post interesting and useful stuff, people who help each other, and who can have a bit of fun as well.

 

Yeah gues its the members and moderation - LIKE DP!

 

Yeah. It is the active people participation that make the forum popular. For active participation, the forum should serve as a good resource of technical information (like dp )

 

Lots of friendly members. Not many members or unfriendly members can scare people off like me.

 

Good friendly members who have a decent level of knowledge to engage in a discussion.

 

I think that good hosting is one of the main reasons, second thang is administration of this forum, third - vision of this forum. Thats what Im say

 

the members *cough* and the moderators *cough*

 

In fact, everything that has been mentioned above are important. What do you say?

 

The people probaly, this forum is great because of the people on it and their attitudes.

 

A good forum will require all of these:

1) Content. Good content is a must if you intend to attract more members
2) Members. Decent regular members, who post regularly, taking the strain off yourself from starting all the threads
3) Hosting. The forum needs to be quick and reliable
4) Design. It has to look the part, there are too many forums out there which are very basic and uninviting.

I have been building my forum now since the end of October 2007, and it is only now that I am beginning to see the fruits of my labour. I have a few threads which seem to be picked up via social bookmarking, drving plenty of traffic, plus a competition I run lately has gathered some new members too.

It takes constant effort, for example I scour the newspapers each day online for the latest stories relating to our subject matter.

Nobody wants to know an empty or dead forum.

 

Agree. Good content from active people. Thats the key.

 

Some active members and attention from admin/mods will make a great forum!