I am considering adding a forum to my unopened site. 1.) Is a forum difficult to manage? Issues with spam, etc.? 2.) Is it best to offer a forum with many users on down the road or at start-up as an asset to draw in traffic? 3.) What has been your experience if you run a forum yourself?
Forums are great feature to sites, especially a place to discuss products or reviews. Far as spam, there are ways to limit it like validation approval for signups, or special register codes that only humans can see. Forums can take alot of your time, but if your able to get a good staff you should have no major issues.
I don't think you should. I've had experience with them and trust me. They are overly hard to even get a few legit sign ups who will make threads ect. If your serious about making a forum you'll have to have alot of money at hand. Hire a few people and pay them like $1 for about 10 threads which are atleast about 100 words etc. Hire about 20 of them and then hire more and more and if they offer valuble content that people actually want then you might get people to sign up and contribute.
Forums ads a lot of life to your site.. Forums can generate a lot of traffic to your site..its not difficult to maintain a forum provided you have good staff.. and i recommend Vbulletin as forum software as it is highly customisable and has many plugins to avoid spam..etc.. Regards.
I had alot of experience in running forums on different sites! please consider following things You must assure youself to get involved in Forum Management You must work out to generate more traffic for forums Generally forums not gives much revenue but impressive hits can give you much Initially dont go for expensive forums softwares try with open source forums programs because large investment to Forum Software not gives much
Thanks for all the advice. If I utilize a forum for my site it will be open source and free by phpbb. So far every forum I've joined is a product of v-bulletin (must be a good product... although it appears to cost $). My biggest concern is learning how my site works, advertising it, preventing hacks and spam, etc. and then also running a forum. If I don't offer it at first then no one will miss anything. If I offer it at first and screw it up then there's another headache. There are lots of pros and cons weighing on this decision. Maybe if I only allow a few categories to post in at first then this will keep things somewhat smooth at first. Decision time.
Forums do add a lot of life to your site. In fact, I just finished coding a forum from scratch two days ago since I wanted to fully integrate it into my site: http://www.f3music.com/forums.php It has a phpBB2 look since I always liked that version, but I managed to create a fully working forum with BBCode and other popular features such as ignore, spam report, etc. using only two php files whereas phpBB and vbulleton uses 40+ files.