I need advice in starting a forum

[screamingflea]

Hi all, I hope you can offer me some pointers as I'm walking into some very unfamiliar territory.

In the interest of organizing my contacts on Facebook, I took advantage of the new "groups" function and created a category for my buds from my bipolar support group back in my former hometown. I didn't realize that I was creating a separate page by doing so, and that everyone would have the capacity to post to it, complete with its own private chat function. That's fine with me. Once I saw what it was I very seldom post anything there, usually just pages on interesting new research or some lite inspirational things.

It's been pretty well received. Surprisingly so. The other day the president of the group called me up and asked me to expand it to an official function of the group, open to any member. I'm very flattered, but also cautious because I feel that it should be closely moderated. In a vulnerable population like that a lot can go wrong, and I've seen support forums that are overrun by trolls. Not pretty. Since I'm three time zones away, and have a life and schedule of my own, I can't guarantee that I could maintain it to my standards.

SLF has a very different focus of course, but I've always been impressed at how you handle things here. I realize that a FB page is very different from a forum, but could you please offer me some pointers? I'm extremely low-tech, so you may want to dumb it down. :confused:

[Crystal]

It might be better if you posted specific questions as you go along? We have a few techies here who might have good input: Alan, Gina, kib, earthshepherd, and others I can't name right off the top of my head. And I'm glad to help, although my method is to crash around behind the scenes and see what I can f*** up. lol (off to watch the blizzard for awhile, but I'll be back later...)

[Gina]

I'm not a techie at all (is techniphobia a word?), but do have some limited experience behind the scenes at other forums. I've never set one up myself however.

There are free forum set ups out there. You probably will have to live with advertising, unless you want to pay.

In general, over time, forums can get a lot of spammers and trolls, but that can be dealt with. Spammers who post commercial messages, sometimes quite cleverly, are just banned and messages deleted or moved out of sight. There are often several of these a day, at all hours, and often they post several messages at once. These are people who are hired to go to various forums specifically to place advertising. You can select several moderators to help - like here.

Trolls (those who intentionally try to upset people for the thrill) are a pain, but there are a couple things that you can do. If you want to be especially protective of your general members, at registration, you can ask a question or two about why they want to join, and personally screen them before ok'ing their registration. Of course that's not fool proof and takes your time.

If you do get trolls (sometimes hard to tell if they are just messing with you) you can ban them. If someone is too disruptive to a community, banning sometimes just has to happen. I once read a basic forum 'golden' rule that requires people to act as they would if they were a guest in your own home. If members can't be civil, they can be warned privately, be suspended temporarily as the next level of warning, and eventually shown the door if they continue to be disruptive. Of course not everyone is happy with that sort of solution, but I know of no better way. These sorts of very difficult decisions will bring you the most grief as a forum owner, and unless you have a thick skin, is what brings most people to the end of the road as admins. Life's too short and all. The anonymity of the internet can bring out some odd behavior.

If people want to discuss really personal things on your forum, you can set up rooms that are not visible to the public, and that only registered, signed in members can read and post to. It's better than nothing, but seriously, anything anyone writes and posts on the internet runs the risk of being seen. Same with posts here. :)

Hope that helps. Good luck.

[Juicifer]

Hi,
Kinda wondering what the status of this is by now?

I have been administator on three web forums before and have done forum postings as copywriter at a later stage.
Setting up a forum is not really that hard. I used PhpBB that can be downloaded for free and a 'skin' can brighten up the forum as well. The hard part is sitting down and grand different roles like administrators, moderators and 'guests' etc. I wouldn't worry too much about trolls, the current software is very well protected. From experience I know that if a hacker really wants to crash your site and/or forum he will be able to do so. The only weapon you have against this is backing up regularly.

Need technical advice? If you google "PhpBB forum suport" or "vBulletin suport" than you will find support forum where other administrators tell about the issues they have with their forums and most of the time you can pop your question there.

Setting up a forum is going to cost you a good amount of time if you would like to set up a 100% safe forum. But after that, it takes minor updates from the side of the administrator. Moderators can guide the people on the forum in rules and regulations, I never bothered with that as an administrator (only in case of a major dispute).