Hi everybody, I require a big big help. Can anyone please tell me how make ur own forum site ? how much $$ involved . from where to publish and wat software should be used. Please help plz. right from the scratch.
First you should make a plan regarding your aims, what the forum will be about, target audience and so on. All choises regarding forum structure, marketing, script(s) etc should be based on this plan. The budjet depends on how much you are able to do by yourself (design, installations etc) and of course what type of script you choose. Also you need some money for hosting and possibly also for marketing. About scripts, there are two leading paid scripts vBulletin (same as DP uses) and Invision Power Board, both are great scripts, easy to manage and actively developed. Then there are many open source bulletin board scripts, some (phpbb and SMF) you are even able to install very easilly through fantastico (if a host offers this addon for cPanel). So first decide what kind of forum you want and then take time to compare these scripts (if you already know what you want just post and I can help you with choosing or you can of course pm me too). Creating a board structure, sections, folders etc is pretty easy as well as administrating and moderating the forum. Take some time before you go public with your forum to finalize it, playing around with the script and different functions, so that you know how things work...And finally when the forum is up, then just concentrate on marketing
phpbb IMO is a good choise for basic boards. It has all basic functions included "out of the box", complite feature list: http://www.phpbb.com/features.php . The project has been in active and professional developement for years. Also there are tons of modifications for it available, but you should only use mods approved by phpbb and install only those modifications you need, as when more and more core files get modified forum upgrades will eventually become very time consuming to perform as you can't just overwrite those files without loosing those modifications. For big boards and boards that needs to assure possible problems are solved as fast as possible I don't recommend it though, as phpbb doesn't offer any other support than community support, which is mostly much slower than vBulletin or IPB custommer support. They also don't fix bugs for you etc...you need to be able to make upgrades, bug fixes etc by yourself with instructions given by phpbb or other phpbb users.