I'm a total noob to building forums. What is a good cheap (or free) way to build a forum? I am getting some pretty decent traffic on one of my sites, so I think a forum is the next step. It also has to be something I can add adsense to.
phpbb Search google for it, i'm sure you will find the site. It's not as good a forum as vbulitin, but it's free whereas vbulitin isn't.
I second that. Tried them all, didn't like the price of IPB and VB, and MyBB is my choice for now. It basically has all the features and interface of all the forums out there - combined Hope this helps. Check out http://www.mybboard.net for more information about this.
Vbulitin doesn't cost much. I'm going to buy a life membership when I need to make a forum for one of my sites. Which looks like it'll be soon.
Use SMF from simplemachines.org, it's free and you could convert the data if someday you want change to vbulletin
myBB is probably the best free one since, alot of hackers go to phpBB forums. However, phpBB has more hacks so you have to assess the opportunity cost of having a forum which could potentially get hacked more often then the other or more features. Either way both are vunerable to hackers.
^ why not? noobs like smf best because it's easy to install. adding themes and mods takes less time, too but phpbb for me, looks better than smf.