Building your own forum is a great way to create an instant community. A forum is arguably the oldest form of group interaction on the internet. You can find a forum on just about any topic that grabs you. And the reason is simple; they are full of people talking, asking questions, answering questions and generally discussing a common topic. It’s a wonderful way to become involved, talk to like-minded people or just find the answer to your problem.
Vbulletin is one of the oldest and well respected software platforms for building a forum. It isn’t free, but I reckon it’s the most popular forum building platform available and powers more forums than any other software. A site licence will cost you $195 but you get a slick user interface, it’s easy to install, SEO optimised, runs MySQL with PHP and has excellent support. You also get lots of built-in applications, including photo albums, groups, calendar, event management, polls, blog and article-based CMS publishing.
User or membership management is excellent too. This will help you to manage your forum effectively. You can configure multiple roles, security, comprehensive post and thread features, membership features, avatar options, user options, moderation, different languages, user help and support, and different styling or templates. In short, it’s a professional and flexible solution; probably why it’s so popular. If you want to see what a typical vbulletin forum looks like, check out website babble, run by Lisa Irby. It’s a forum for webmasters.
If you want to build an instant community, start a forum.
