Creating a forum

[CommT]

We're looking into creating a forum for our visitors.

I've identified that our target market is very active on online forums, and that this is the best way of encouraging user participation amongst our audience (I know forums as such are a bit old-fashioned, but so is our audience!)

I have never set a forum up before... I was wondering if there was anything your collective brains could come up with in terms of a 'wish list' the forum should have... For example, I want to limit spam (LOL, I know, losing battle) - what measures would you put in place to do this? I was thinking that users would have to create a login to participate, and that they would only be allowed to post links after a certain number of posts - is there anything else I've missed?

We will be looking to promote the forum via email marketing to our customers, and will set up logins for them each, and invite them to join individually. There are about 10,000 people we could invite in this way (list is growing every day, so it could very well be a lot more by the time we launch!)

What else would you suggest? I was thinking of display advertising (maybe via adwords remarketing), and obviously we'll be looking to list organically (but I don't think this can happen instantly, I kind of feel it's a chicken/egg thing - we need the participation before we get ranked, but to get participation we probably need to be ranked!)

I was also wondering if we should set it up on a subdomain or not? I'm in two minds about which is best for us!

Anyway, any input from you would be enormously beneficial.

Thank you!

[CommT]

We are looking into an MVC plugin for our umbraco site. I believe there can be custom elements, such as the sign-up process.

Would you say it's better to host it on a sub-domain? I'm thinking this is the way forward. What are your thoughts?

Within our niche there are three very popular forums, none of which seem to have severe spam issues. I expect they are well moderated (and I've said this is a necessity). Ours will have someone looking after it (moderating) as well as people dedicated to answering specific questions.

Thanks for your advice! It's greatly received.

[gazzerman1]

For me the one thing that will send it crashing and burning into flames is the spam issue.

No matter what common software you use spammers have written robots to crawl signup pages and create accounts. Some have written them so that they bypass those pages and directly post to the signup success pages avoiding many checks etc..

Do you very best to create a custom sign up process that cannot be easily filled in by a robot. Something totally unique to your site. Remove all signals of any software you may be using, logos specific html code that is easy to identify etc.. all these are things robots look for and they they NEVER stop hammering your site.

Its almost worth creating a custom build. As these xrumor link building schemes still work in Google. Others use them to build negative seo links. So basically your site will be used as a host for bad links. Go above and beyond to protect yourself.

Hope that helps.