There have been a few posts about forums over the last few days, so I thought I'd throw my hat into the ring as well. I'm toying with the idea of starting a forum, which is obviously going to be hard work. My question is should I jump straight in at the deep end and purchase vBSEO (which seems to accepted as the best forum software), as that will give the forum the best chance of succeeding or should I start with something else (which is free), see if the forum takes off and then maybe further down the line upgrade to vBSEO? How much effort/time does it take to change a forum once it has been established anyway? Thanks in advance for your thoughts ...
I wouldn't recommend using vB right away since you might not like this business/get tired/bored out of it. SMF is a very very good free forum option.
I'd take the opposite view. The software is good, so if you have the money go for it. It's not a massive amount to lose, and you always have the licence to do a different website with (i.e: make failed one close down or a free forum and use vB for another idea).
I'm not totally new to this - I'm running a couple of sites at the moment, it's just that I've never really tried setting up a community. I've noticed that VB offer a leased licence for a year at half the price. Maybe that's the best option. It's a bit of a half way house ...
i would definently recommend you do not start with vb because it is a lot of money starting of ($160), i have used mybb, phpbb, smf and i have found that SMF is by far the best and easiest to use for me personally so i would recommend you give that a go
I jumped straight in the deep end with a vB but i do not regret it, yes my first site diddnt work but i have the license for life and i know its there if i want to use it.
IMO it would be better to use phpBB (2) and use the $100 or so you would have used on vBulletin, to put towards promotion.
If you're serious about running a forum, you should get vBulletin from day one. It's only $160 to obtain a license, and the product itself is great. Don't let frugal DPers who won't spend a cent on a real site tell you otherwise. And for the record, I did jump straight into VB from day one of starting up one of my sites. Everything worked out fine, and I wouldn't have wanted it any other way.
Thanks for the feedback - I have made a bit of cash from a couple of other sites, so I could use that to purchase a full VB licence, although I value the point that it may be a better idea to spend that money on promoting it instead. If I was to use something like SMF to start with, how much hassle/work would it be to import all those posts into a VB forum further down the line?