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Exploiting your free phpBB forum, from A to Z
Forums are always fun. Who wouldn’t want to be an Administrator on a forum with several thousands of members? This however is a lot harder than it might seem, and that’s why we’re giving you a few pointers on the most common mistakes with creating a free phpBB forum.
Categories/Forums
A very common mistake is that upon the creation of a free phpBB forum people try to think of all the forums that could be used, and that might be useful one day. This really isn’t smart, because you’re going to start with a low number of members. If you have 30 different forums and only 10 members, the place is going to look deserted. You have to target big areas at the start to get the discussion going, the posts racing, and the threads flowing. If you notice a big interest in one specific thing, and you have a decent base for it on your free phpBB forum, you can create a dedicated forum for it. The forums we suggest starting with are: Announcements, Feedback, General chat, Spam/Testing. There is a lot of room to specify later, when you have a decent member base this way.
Guest View
Not that common anymore, but some forums still have it. This is a disaster if you want people to join your forum, because 99% of the people will want to be able to get to know what the forum is about before actually joining. After all, what if the forum has nothing to offer? The registration would have been a waste of time. You could have eaten a twinky instead. A disaster, I tell you.
Initiative
We’ve also noticed on several forums that the people who created the free phpBB forum don’t realize that it’s their responsibility to make sure that the forum is active, and stays active. Start a few threads, have at least one sticky in each forum. Do anything to remove that god-awful zero, and to keep the ‘last post’ date fairly recent. No-one wants to join a dead or deserted forum, do they?
free phpBB forum Hosts
What a lot of people don’t seem to realize is that the place where you ‘made’ your forum matters - greatly! Free forum sites such as InvisionFree and ProBoards are widely used and easy to set up, but there’s a large number of crappy forums floating around on these. Due to conscious and unconscious links in your mind, people will remember those crappy forums when they see that you have your forum there. This lessons the chance of them visiting or signing up on your forum.
Try out www.Forumotion.com that earns a great reputation in free phpBB forum, and will convince users to join and participate on your forum!
Staff
Another pointer for forum-administrators to-be, don’t hire staff right away. We’ve all seen our share of posts offering administrator, supermod or moderator rights to the first X people to join. This is not just unneeded, it’s also pretty stupid. By giving someone you don’t know at all access to your forums’ vital functions, you’re asking to be screwed over by some