First off, use MyBB it's pretty good and nice forum software that allows for quick and easy access.
When starting anything, like a forum, the biggest and hardest thing to do is get people to go on it. People aren't gonna go to a forum with one other person on it now are they? So you need to think of a plan to somehow get people on your forum, you need to think of a plan that makes your forum different from other Naruto forums and how you're gonna get that initial community. That's the most important thing and that is what will separate your forum from the hundreds of forums that are essentially dead. The Furry Forums main idea for that was being called, simply, the furry forum, it's literally the first thing that comes up in google searching for a furry forum and thus it has gotten this popular member base. So you need that initial thing that makes your forum good to other people.
The biggest thing with a forum is community, TFF is fairly self sustaining now so don't use TFF as a guide on how to run the forum JUST yet, because your forum will be nothing like TFF when it starts. So, once you got your initial playerbase you need to keep people interested, need them to for some reason keep coming back to your forum. Maybe hold lots of competitions with prizes? Maybe give constant news feeds and quickly rush to give everyone all the Naruto news? Whatever it is, a small community will stay a small community if there's nothing to do, so you need something to do, you need dedication and hard work on your forum, it's not going to be easy! You need to put lots of time and effort in getting it started, sure sometimes forums just spring from nothing and get really popular for no "real" reason, it is possible, but it's unlikely, I wouldn't count on it!
So next you need to make sure your forum is ok technically. Familiarize yourself with the software (MyBB is better! Xerofire is even better than that but it costs $200~). It's also good to either be a coder (with PhP if you're using MyBB) or know a coder who will be willing to administrate your site, you'd be surprised how much coding technical glitches there are! If it weren't for 2kanman the KoL forum (my forum kind of) would be pretty screwed. So it's always good to be or know someone who is confident with the software. Set up some rules when the community gets big enough and set up some nice forum plugins like top posters and donation meters and things like that, TFF for this is a great guide to go off.
You're entire goal in setting up the forum is to get it to the point where the community is self sustaining. That is, the community will stay level without too much intervention from you. When a community is self sustaining though, it doesn't grow, so you need to intervene for it to grow, when you get it to a big enough community for it to not need to grow, then you have completed your objective.
Topic: Forums (Read 882 times)