Hey Guys, I'm about to start a forum, general forum, I was wondering how many actual forums or sub-forums do you recommend I start with? It is going to be a general forum so topics can really range. I'm open to any suggestions. Thanks!
At the beginning I would go with 7-9 forums on topic (divided into 2-3 categories) + 2 other forums as a separate category ('Welcome to the board'/'Introductions' + 'Forums Feedback & Suggestions'). Also create hidden forums (e.g. as subforums of 'Forums Feedback & Suggestions' section): 1st as a Staff section and 2nd as a Trash section. From the head start include Thread Prefixes Hack into vBulletin - if you run vBulletin (since ver. 3.7.x it has already been included into the vB package by default). It will be useful later on when you will be adding new forums/subforums and moving part of the content there. As of my experience there's no need to create new forums until you reach at least: 1000-1500 registered REAL users AND ~40 000 posts* AND ~5000 threads* AND users won't start having an idea about creating new forums as an effect of sorting things out in at least one of the already running forums. Having over 1000 threads in only 1 forum (only at the beginning, not when you already have XX of forums) is a door-bell for you to start thinking about moving some of those similar-topic threads to a new forum. * These are estimated values and could range based on the niche market, number of active users/registered users, posts/day, threads/day ratios.
Could you explain a bit more about the hack for vBulletin, the prefixes? I have no idea about what that is.
Thanks to the Thread Prefixes Hack you may add a prefix to newly created thread (you can select a prefix from a dropdown list when you are on the page where you create a new thread) so that in some way - thanks to the prefixes - you can categorize threads within one particular forum. Prefixes also enable you to filter threads within one forum based on a chosen prefix or sort them A-Z/Z-A by prefixes. You can add prefixes in your vBulletin ACP (Administration Control Panel). Prefixes can be added to each forum separately (or to multiple forums at once) so for each forum you can create a different set of prefixes. You can also mark a prefix with a chosen color (by default black is used).
Do I have to mark every thread one by one or do I basically setup a filter so for a keyword for example it gets a special prefix?
When starting a forum, dont make the same mistake as a lot of people, stick to a certain area and let it grow, many people think that having lots of sections and subforums boost their forums activity, when actually this is not the case, If I go to a forum, I would rather see a small forum with lots of activity, than a big forum with next to none activity. Sometimes it's best to look from an " outside " point of view.
Almost every such Hack works from the moment of installing and activating it. It means, already existing threads will not be automatically marked with any given prefix. You do not also have an option to run a query on existing threads and automatically mark them with a selected (or in some way dynamically - based on the keywords in the thread - changed) prefix. If you already have any existing threads on your forums, you or selected person may (or will have to) manually mark each thread with a given prefix. I know it su**s. I remember when we, with a big help of my Mods, need to move over a few thousand threads to newly created subforums... a N-I-G-H-T-M-A-R-E. Already wrote how many forums should be good to start with. 5 is too little (according to me) 7-9 should do the job. Anyway, you can also do something similar to Card Sorting method (originally it's for creating an Information Architectere within a website, intranet, or any other organisation that is in need of some easy-to-find information structure). Make a list of topics you would like to take up on your forums in a long term. Group them based on a similarity of a subject. To each group give an appropriate name - the one which best describes the group, eg. Music, Software.... These groups are (or at least should occur to be) your forums sections.
For example lets say for now I want to make a "Sports" section and then later on would like to split that up into Basketball, Baseball, Football, whatever, what method would you reccomend? Using the Pre-Fix thing you were talking about?
As for now: threads with prefixes within Sports section, eg.[Basketball] Thread Name. In the (hopefully near) future: - Sport (main section, all threads related to sports) --- Basketball (threads related to basketball only) --- Football (as above) Create subforums only in case of: well-founded demand from users or while visiting Sports section you can see that multiple (count them - accordingly to the overall number of threads/posts on Forums and chosen forum - in hundreds or thousands) threads could be moved to a new forum.