Who here owns a forum
 

and is it successfull?

I'd say we do :glugglug

well ya but its lensman that "owns" it ;) and i already know the answer to it being successfull :P

Nay Nay!

Hef owns it!

Well if you wanna get all technical about it :P

We own several. I would have to say half are successful, but I guess successful is a relative term.

Put it this way, when I was asked to renew licenses yesterday, I went for lifetime rather than annual.

A big No No

Me me me me me me me me i have two open since 1998

Got a few, They're successful, though I don't have em loaded with advertising so I'm not making any money at them. If monetary gain is what you consider success, then I'm not that successful with forums, if it's happ0y members and healthy growing forum, then I am successful.

I have a local mainstream one for my city and it is Unsuccessful
at the moment :(

We have a few of them 2 adult and 1 mainstream.

1. and very much so yes.

i've got a fair few and i'd say 2 are successful. Forums are by far the most difficult site to get off the ground.

run the most popular "spore" forums / site. nearly 100,00 posts, based around a game that isn't even out lol.

Our mainstream consumer forum has almost 2,000 members since February.

forums are hard nowadays, if u started it long ago then it worked

good stuff - hope the activity is up with the forum members too

yes and not yet :-)

I put one together about a year ago but never did anything with it..

You know better Gary

If anybody is interested in purchasing it, please let me know...:thumbsup

I own one thats doing extremely well. Its one of the best if not the best in its niche. And im proud of it knowing how hard it is to get a forum going. Google just put me higher in the list resulting in a total of 100 new members a day :)

I would guess that 40% have at least made a post.

Threads: 592, Posts: 2,501, Members: 1,985

We have incentives for people to at least introduce themselves.

Earlier this year I started a social experiment - I installed a forum script, made sure it's perfectly functional, disabled email verification and account approval and abandoned the board. I came to check on it now few months later and the forum has following stats:

Our users have posted a total of 2524 articles
We have 2864 registered users
Most users ever online was 16 on Sun Sep 02, 2007 5:22 pm

The forum - no surprise - is a spam heaven of doom, but I only invested a little time into it and to a random stranger it will look like it's alive and kicking :)

Yeah, we block spammers, otherwise the numbers would be quite different. I have an adult forum for surfers that got pretty bad before I added some prevention tools.

I've got a vintage surfer forum 40k members now and busy as hell

Still kind of supports what I said before - forums aren't easy to setup and that's not trying to shit on your forum at all.

I did the same by accident, built a forum and got tied up with a whole lot of other projects. Stumbled across it 12 months later and there were 100k of spam posts, couldn't believe it. So just deleted the whole thing.

Now now lets follow the rules

I have one that gets a bunch of traffic, but I'm having spam problems :( If anyone wants to mod it you can spam your own things as much as you want, I just dont have time for it.

i own 3 big azz forums

1 webmaster forum (3k webmasters almost)
1 celebs forum (65k members)
1 adult forum (56k members)

I do! I created one for my promotion at university and there is alot of people using it!

Oh I know. This particular forum network has 100+ niche specific forums in it. Some are definitely more active than others, and there are still a couple that have not been posted in yet.

But considering it has only been active to the public for 8 months, I am happy with the progress. I am confident that it will reach snowball proportions and easily reach the 100 new members a day Franck is getting.

I started one a couple months ago and it seems to be picking up steam slowly but surely. forums are a pain in the ass.

I own one with close to 5000 members. But I don't know if I would call it successful.

Did any of your guys with successful/busy forums use one of those forum populating/posting services at the beginning?

They strike me as pretty vague and non-specific so I wondered if any of them actually would be of any real benefit.

Let me state the rules again...

1. No spamming other boards! We don't spam other boards about GFY. We need the same courtesy!

Man, this is turning into the "people who may get banned" thread. Nice :)

I'd be actually interested to know whether someone can recommend such service from positive experience in the past. Anyone?

Contacted 2, tried one. Would not recommend either.

I have a lot of spare time and will moderate it for you for a small fee:thumbsup

That's why I feel uneasy about trying one out. Unless someone had a seriously positive experience and can 100% recommend

As stated above, our network has 100+ niche specific forums. The inability of outsourced help to follow instructions was more trouble than it was worth.

Then there was the issue of these outsourced guys deciding they could get into arguments with the owners . . .

Damn, that sucks dude. Did it cost you anything? Did they take money up front?

forums are fun to run but it was a lot of work to get started when i did it years ago. Good luck to you mate if you proceed ;-)

spore looks awesome, but im convinced it was just a joke and will never actually happen.

Yeah, it wasn't too much, part of some introductory offer.

As they say, it takes money to make money, and we give out Amazon and Visa gift cards every month, so I just chalk it up to one of the expenses of growth.

There is a new board - though it hasn't "officially" launched (and I won't tell you the url here) - but there's nothing in the rules that states that I can't mention the features of the board...

Preferences Mod

• When a member ignores another member - no thread started by the ignored member shows up in the threads for them.
• Prevent an ignored member from posting in any thread started by the member who ignored them. No more thread sabotages!
• Allow a member to remove any post from any member (other than an admin) that has been posted in a thread they have started. It's your thread - moderate it!
• Allow a member to lock & unlock a thread they have started.

Thread Mod
Threads posted will be in the main webmaster forum topic and we would like to be able to sort these by offering "sub-topic" choices when making a post (and as a board reader) choosing which of these to read from the user control panel. For example, the poster may create a "would you hit it" thread. You, as the forum viewer can choose in your control panel to see (or not see) "would you hit it" threads.

Banner Mod
You are allowed 1 banner to start with that you will share advertising space with us 50/50. The more you post, the higher % of the time your banner shows over ours and the number of your banners you can have in rotation. Your participation in the forums drives revenue - so shouldn't you be allowed to advertise in your own threads for free?

Blog Feature
Promote yourself, promote your products or webmaster referral and let people know who you are, what you do, what sites you operate and how best to contact you!

I have a few of them, and yes, they are successful for us.

What YOU call success may vary, but they do drive sales for our site(s) they are attached to.

10,000 posts per month is only the beginnings of success in my opinion. Even at that, things could still easily go the other way and fizzle out.