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Hardest part about running a forum?



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Hardest part about running a forum?

Running a forum has it's fun moments but it also has it's challenging moments, I know, I have run many forums and have always hit the challenging once quite often.

The most challenging things about running a forum I feel are keeping it active and promoting it.

Keeping a forum active takes a lot of work, sometimes you will need help from other staff members such as other admins or moderators to keep the forum active. Without active forums posts daily and new fresh content daily your forum will die and people will not come back. Finding things to talk about should be top priority to make the new content come easier.

Promoting is another challenging obstacle. It's difficult to advertise in the correct places and get the advertisements to stick. Posting on forums related to the genre of your forum with your link attached or even affiliating with similar forums and websites is a good idea however then it's making sure you have the fresh content so that when people hit your site they have something to read and reply to. Those I feel are the hardest parts about running a forum.

What do you feel is the hardest part about running a forum?

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TommyCarey
Marketing a forum would definitely be a tough thing to do since there are more than likely bigger forums in your niche doing the same thing already. Another thing I would think that is incredibly annoying would be managing all the spammers who want to come in to simply drop a link after they post something like "This is a great post! (BAM! Link)" lol. I know there are plenty of spam deterrents or automated spam managers, but they can only do so much and it's difficult to stop actual people logging in to post garbage Hardest part about running a forum?

I completely agree with you when you say that keeping a forum active is definitely a tough thing to do. With the Search Engines the way they are today you need to have fresh content on your pages almost every day, so by not posting to your own forum daily will just keep you out of the top SERPs. The good thing is that you can pay people a few bucks to post on your forum for you. I've paid plenty of service providers here at seocheckout.com to post on my forums for me and they've done a great job. Some of these people I work out a deal with and they even make dozens of accounts which talk to each other lol. If you can get 10 people making dozens of accounts in order to talk to each other and share information you're going to be a happy forum owner in no time Hardest part about running a forum?

One really annoying thing is that you always have to stay cutting edge with a forum because the forum that starts pulling your traffic is the one that has the best features, is user friendly, loads fast, has a sweet design, etc. If you can't keep up with design trends and the basic requirements in order to keep your forum up and running, you won't be running that forum for a long time Hardest part about running a forum?

I actually try to avoid putting forums on my websites now because I got so frustrated with the amount of management I had to do in order to keep it looking classy and spam free. I've had moderators helping me out doing the same thing, but it just never seemed like enough Hardest part about running a forum?



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N0VA
I think marketing your forum and getting members is a hard thing. yea you can get members, but getting active members is hard. Members are one key thing in a forum.... and managing content is hard too, there are spammers and may post useless, unrelevent stuff, so I think running a forum is hard, the activation energy needed is higher but when you go on, it will be much easier with experience and inspiration....



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Corzhens
Like any other endeavor, the so called birthing pains of a forum is the hardest to deal with. I have been seeing forums with zero content as if the admin is waiting for walk-in registrants which is a rarity nowadays. Some forums with some contents couldn't really kick off because like they are dependent on the present members of the community. I'd say starting a forum would require a gargantuan effort from the owner to launch a decent and relentless campaign in gaining members. And making the members to remain and be active is the next step.



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jpyy
Definitely, getting traffic is the toughest part (considering that the problem of spambots is generally out of the way). Note, it's possible to barter for material, but not traffic. In fact, traffic exchanges seem to be scams. However, though, I have seen a few legit ways of getting free traffic like social media (up to a point and depending on the niche), affiliate stuff, as well as another unique thing.



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Soulwatcher
The hardest part of running a forum is the time and effort it takes to keep it going. A lot of people think all you have to do is throw up a forum and presto you have a busy forum. But the sad truth is it's next to impossible to get a forum going. 99.98% of the new start up forums fail because people don't realise the excessive amount of work it takes to get a forum going.



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mildredtabitha
I am glad to learn about some challenges admins face when running a forum. Some are similar to those faced by those running blogs. I have experienced some of the challenges mentioned here like trying to get traffic. I think having someone to help you overcome this challenges is better and can prevent a forum from dying.



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