I will be launching a forum in a couple of months but have no experience with forums. The forum will be a website marketing forum that will mainly focus on the Buy/Sell/Trade section where internet marketers will be able to B/S/T forum links, affiliate programs, website links ect. The idea for the forum is to be a leading resource for new and exsisting internet marketing products and strategies... where internet marketers can discuss and rate different products and share thier strategies. So once again I have never set up a forum before. I like DPs set up and would like to kind of use this forum as a model. I will be spending alot to launch the forum and have a somewhat decent initial marketing budget to jumpstart the forum. I will also be hiring mods once it grows to the point I expect. So I was just curious if someone here at DP could kind of help guide me in setting up a good forum before I launch it. I would be willing to pay for your guidence (email support) and helping tweak once I get it set up... price negotiable... but extensive forum experience a must. PM me... thanks, Other thoughts welcome as well.
If you are going with a vB forum, then the set up is not all that hard, and if you only pick mods/add-ons/hacks that have support, then those are pretty easy to set up as well. You'll save yourself some cash if you buy it now, test out getting it going on your own, and then keep it that way. Set up a test forum according to the vB guidelines, and diddle that till you take any additional plug-ins live. Though, keep in mind, that more and more plug-ins are getting away from the oddities that are happening on vbulletin.org, so you may wish to look at their individual sites. Personally, I'd allow members to close their own threads in your BST section...this will help keep older threads from getting bumped. You can also encourage the closing of threads once the final transaction has been made.