Creating a forum like WickedFire - what does it take?

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katoved

katoved

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I have a very large niche that has no forums currently in existence. I think that the community surrounding this niche would be VERY interested in having a forum. The forum users would exhibit a VERY high loyalty rate I am sure. How can I go about doing this? How much optimization did Jon have to put into WickedFire? How do I create a forum and what type of programming knowledge does it take (because I have NONE). Thanks for your help.
 


And what with how you're confident about popular interest, it sounds like a winner.

Forums aren't very hard to customize either. There's plenty of tutorials out there, because there's plenty of people doing it.
 
How do I make it look as good as WickedFire.com? So many forums out there look like shit. Jon, would you give me this forum set-up if I paid you for it? The only thing I want to change is the logo.
 
WickedFire's skin is based around the logo... Change that, and it'll look odd without the right logo.

Just get a logo design contest going somewhere, then design the rest of the forum around the logo.
 
Post a thread with absurd and false information and hope to gain a following of internet worshippers to fill up your ego.
 
Or you could do as imagenesis does... spend your entire life, posting retarded trolling comments on forums... To fill up the void of having no social life nor friends.
 
You want it to look like this, use vBulletin. No ifs, ands, or buts its the best forum software out there. If you want to be cheap and save $150 on the reg fee fine, but you are going to waste a lot of time doing things that vB does out of the box.

As for customizing vB's skin to look like this. All you need is a logo, all of the colors can be customized within its admin CP.

Your biggest hurdle in starting a forum is the traffic. Jon had a loyal following on his forum and good contacts, he was able to reach a core group of the target audience on day 1 of launch. My most successful forum I already had a stream of several thousand targetted uniques in that niche from the start.

One word of warning, the amount of work you put in to the forum vs the revenue you'll see from it, at least in the first year or two is probably going to look ugly. Lee is selling this huge guitar forum on Sitepoint right now, he says it makes $300-$400 a month.

Some niches you can do better, and I mean a lot better. I suspect that Adam Dicker who owns the domaining forum DNForum.com has pulled in close to a million dollars off of it from subscriptions, plus whatever else from advertising.
 
I saw that guitar forum auction and was wondering why it made so little. Was it just poorly monetized?
 
Don't even bother with phpBB if you think its going to be a big board. Even modestly small ones have to roll over to other software because of the vulnerabilities. I've looked though a ton of free phpBB skins, 99% of them suck.
 
Ive seen quite a few large phpBB forums out there that seem to do fine, so why V-bul.? phpBB is highly extensible and customizable and its free.

Im a cheap prick and If I can save a buck fifty using something that does the job and is free im going to use it.

Can you offer specific details? I have never used V-B but get the feeling that it is over-rated. Probably very good, but over-rated.
 
phpbb is open source... so any hacker has complete access to how the forums' backend runs. if you're running a decent sized board... it will get hacked.
 
kyleirwin said:
phpbb is open source... so any hacker has complete access to how the forums' backend runs. if you're running a decent sized board... it will get hacked.
Click to expand...

you know what else is open source? about 80% of the servers used over the ENTIRE INTERNET!!!

Open source is safer, both in my opinion and historically, because there's a community with vested interest in rooting out and fixing vulnerabilities.
 
Andrew said:
You want it to look like this, use vBulletin. No ifs, ands, or buts its the best forum software out there. If you want to be cheap and save $150 on the reg fee fine, but you are going to waste a lot of time doing things that vB does out of the box.

As for customizing vB's skin to look like this. All you need is a logo, all of the colors can be customized within its admin CP.

Your biggest hurdle in starting a forum is the traffic. Jon had a loyal following on his forum and good contacts, he was able to reach a core group of the target audience on day 1 of launch. My most successful forum I already had a stream of several thousand targetted uniques in that niche from the start.

One word of warning, the amount of work you put in to the forum vs the revenue you'll see from it, at least in the first year or two is probably going to look ugly. Lee is selling this huge guitar forum on Sitepoint right now, he says it makes $300-$400 a month.

Some niches you can do better, and I mean a lot better. I suspect that Adam Dicker who owns the domaining forum DNForum.com has pulled in close to a million dollars off of it from subscriptions, plus whatever else from advertising.
Click to expand...

Andrew, thanks for the great tips. I really do believe that this forum can be wildely popular within the niche that it operates. It is going to be hard to generate initial traffic, but the stickiness should be really high. I do have a mailing address for the associations all across america. So maybe sending a press release kit, or some type of insentive via the mail will help. One other way of monetizing the project will be to sell a book I plan on writing. The AdSense revenue should really suck because the KW's are really low paying, almost non existent, but on the flip side, it will make things easier for me to advertise.
 
it will get hacked.
Click to expand...

You sound very confident about that.

I have a hard time seeing why so many thousands of people use phpBB for their large sites if it so vunerable. I think some of these bigger sites that are making money and have been around for years would have made the switch if this was the case.

Now im curious and am going to have to do some research.

I think sometemple makes a good point.
 
jerxs said:
You sound very confident about that.

I have a hard time seeing why so many thousands of people use phpBB for their large sites if it so vunerable. I think some of these bigger sites that are making money and have been around for years would have made the switch if this was the case.

Now im curious and am going to have to do some research.

I think sometemple makes a good point.
Click to expand...

Look at most of the huge forums on the net and see what software runs them. Is it phpBB? Theres a reason why the answer is no.
 
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