How much does it cost to start a forum

sarah_harvey said:

People here think too much about marketing to understand how a forum works. If you have ever started a forum like I have, then you know it takes perseverance and dedication. You are lucky though...since torrent forums would be easier to market in the hackers/illegal download genre.

Just get your domain and hosting sorted, and if you got hosting through hostgator or godaddy, then all you have to do is go to their quick install applications and choose phpBB and install it. Once installed, visit www.phpBB.com and go to this section:

http://www.phpbb.com/styles/

Now from this area you can view the style demo's (although it appears to be offline at this minute) and once you found once that you like, you can easily download it and install it. Alternatively visit sites like http://www.phpbb3styles.net/, or http://www.phpbbstyles.com/ etc.

Once you have your theme the way you want to look you need to visit some other torrent forums and hack forums. See how they present themselves. They will have a specific post format like:

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Small thumbnail screenshot of application, software, ebook etc.

Then a short description follows.

Then the links/torrent links where you can find it.

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Add additional categories etc and you have a forum. For marketing just link up your forum with any other hack sites and forums and you will have it made. Make sure you get something like torrent harvester to find torrents or something and just actively post the torrents and let other sites promote your torrents. If you specialise in some specific hard-to-find torrents then it it will make things easier for you when people search for it on the search engines etc.

As far as moderators go... join a few other hack sites and then in some sections they will allow you to promote your site. Promote it and ask if one or two would consider becoming moderators. You shouldn't offer money unless you are really desperate to get them and same for users. Pointless to pay people to post posts at times, because if you try and get normal people to the site and they hardly see anyone on it, they won't stay around. Seen it happen many times. People delude themselves if they think this works. Maybe in the internet marketing world...but for entertainment sites and community sites it doesn't work.

That is my opinion and I have started several forums way back 4 years ago when all these methods weren't around and the old way of getting users were to simply go and find them.

Get MSN, AIM, SKYPE accounts set up for your admin account and add it to whatever forum/site you join and when people want to join your lists just add them. Spend an hour or two a day on these instant messengers with all your "fans" and you will have a following that will go wherever you go.

You need to be a social butterfly in essence really. There were days when I had 20+ people on at any given time and had to talk to people all the time. It made it easier when startig forums to ask them to join (which they did) and then start it off.

No money was every involved.

The good old days!

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jdenwar said:

So how much would be the forum script??

What is the good alternative for vBulletin or PhpBB??

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mgstudent said:

Everyone's given great advice so far in terms of the price of everything. One thng that people always think about after the fact is the amount of time you need to invest.

I have a few forums and without thinking 2 hours can pass with me just doing the basics on a forum like deleting the spam, welcoming newbies, replying to PMs and forum emails and doing general cleaning and starting a few new posts.

It can be extremely rewarding - but especially at the start you'll need to put in a lot of time.

Good luck

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