The Question of our last poll was – ‘Should ProBlogger.net add Forums?’ and the results from the 430 votes were:
* Yes: 48% (205)
* No: 44% (190)
* I don’t know: 8% (35)
It was a close thing but the affirmative has it.
I’m leaning towards it myself after much consideration this week.
My thoughts are that if I run with it I will do so with small group of voluntary moderators and initially with limited areas of discussion (possibly to expand later). The advice I’ve had on which forum software to use has been to pay for vBulletin which I think seems to be a wise choice.
Thank you to all who voted and especially to the many people who sent emails and left comments.
I’ll look forward to seeing the forum in action. Hopefully it will prove to be a worthwhile addition to problogger, and won’t tie up too much time, energy and bandwidth.
Good Luck!
I wouldn’t do it if I were you Darren. You’re already writing full-time as it is, having a forum will just increase your screen-time by a huge amount. Your site will also lose its appeal in some ways, because having a forum might discourage people from leaving comments on your posts and you could find yourself repeating information, which would be distracting for me personally, not sure about others.
Whatever you decide to do, good luck.
Forums are frecuently targeted for attacks, not to mention the server resources it consumes, I think pro blogger does it well with posts & comments but if you want to go for it (there are many positive reasons to do it too), I advice you to host it on another server, something like forums.problogger.net to avoid problems with the blog. Hope it helps. Good luck!
Its going to be more work than you think… but I also think it will bridge a gap.
I’m not sure if your aware of it or not but there are a lot of us forum owners that visit this site daily. There really isn’t anything like this for forum owners and most if the info you post applies to both kinds of sites. I own 3 active forums and no blogs yet… but visit every day.
Just a thought.
Hey Darren,
I think you are making the right choice. A Forum will only add to the usefulness of ProBlogger.
If you need someone to moderate a newbie catagory from a newbie’s POV let me know. (you can’t be much newbier than me).
Joe
Darren,
Your recent “beginner questions” post is the perfect reason to host a forum. There are a lot of new bloggers who are looking for some basic answers, which the rest of the community could help with. My 2-cents.
Vic
Yes, if you are determined to add a forum, vBulletin is the best. Have you put much thought into how a forum is going to change your site?
I think this will be an excellent site to test WordPress Forums :)
vBulletin is OK, we’ve been using it for years. It’s clunky to style and adapt however – so all vBulletin sites end up looking the same.
Yea, I agree with Rachel. I prefer Vanilla
I would consider using http://www.simplemachines.org/ instead of having to pay for vBulletin
Why not PHPBB?? its open source, plenty of plugins and templates…
Darren – the way to add forums is to integrate them with your blog commenting system – check out what we did at hyscience.com – the comment form at the bottom of every page is actually the gateway to our forum system. The corresponding forum, which has entries inserted automatically from our blog, is at http://www.hyscience.com/talk
If you need a hand setting up vbulletin drop me a line (I run/own 4 vbulletin based forums), also happy to do some mod work if needed.
@Duncan
probablly since a PHPBB site gets hacked every week.
I put up a forum on Blogoplex, but have not had any participation yet.
Suggestions?