Costs of Operating a Forum

[MySweeper]

Could anyone please explain to me the cost of running a Forum?

I have been told that besides the Hosting costs, that it is expensive.

Below is an excerpt of a Post by a moderator/owner of a particular Forum that I belong to on the subject.

Any info would be greatly appreciated!


The original design of the first website ran about $1500. That was three years ago. Since then, we have upgraded the software....another $1000 in programing time. We have had two upgrades since inception three years ago. That ran about $500. Let's see, I'm up to about $3,000.00. We spend $20/month in hosting fees. That's about another $750. The actual total I have is about $4,000.00 so far invested into this. In donations, we have received less than $2500.

There is no such thing as a FREE forum. Sure there are some Hobby Forums on Yahoo and such. We had to design ours from the ground up. And every modification we made to the vBulletin software required a programmer to write some code.

[gabrielcrowe]

apart from the extreme cost related to modification. this is a logical breakdown of the costs, but they failed to mention the most expensive commodity required for running a forum.

time.

[cbarling]

This forum runs on vBulletin - see http://www.vbulletin.com/about.php

The software costs £91 + £170 per annum for updates. You have to install it on a server and pay for the server on top of that.

No way should you get anyone to develop a forum for you, use this package or a similar one.

By the way, don't be fooled by the US look of the site - they're in the UK near Reading.

Chris

[pinbrook]

There are also plenty of open source forum software too - PHPBB being a leader.

You can also get skins so it is quite easy to blend the colours/design into your site.

Thus total cost is hosting, which if you already have a website can be integrated, some hosts charge for databases (but not all)

total cost so far maybe £100 to host, and maybe a couple hundred initial configuration time ( ie setting up administrators, deciding how to alllow memebership, filtering bad words etc).

The real cost lies in the moderation of the forum, here costs can escalate.... for example consider this forum, ChrisB has told us the fixed costs, but how much does it cost actinic in staffing to pay for ChrisD, Bruce etc to moderate. Thats the true cost of any BB

[PeterThake]

phpBB2 forum

Try phpBB2. It is free, and very good. It does need an SQL dbase, but often this is included in your existing hosting package. Whoever wrote the stuff about it costing 1000's of dollars must have re-invented the wheel.

Fixed cost of running a shop forum about nil (my Actinic web host package through 4surehosting includes all I need as standard). Running costs... well, I check it each day and delete any spam, so say about an hour a week.

Advantages: a terrific bit of 'sticky' content for your site plus you can get some excellent info from your customers on what they want, don't want, like, don't like etc etc.

Disadvantages: Spam. Blinking spam, and lots of it. You can avoid an awful lot by adding some extras to phpBB2 (also free, developed by the terrific phpBB2 community) but some spam will slip through and it can be undesirable in terms of content. You ned to delete this manually. Easy enough though!

[NormanRouxel]

I've got a phpBB forum that I use to support my Actinic patches. It runs happily on a low-cost 1&1 shared hosting server.

As said above the only real cost is time. Plus the initial extra effort of putting in a decent CAPTCHA add-on to stop the spammers being able to post on it.

You also have to periodically log-in as Administrator in order to check that the software is up-to-date and install updates if it isn't.

[PaulGrimshaw]

my fave is vbulletin and it has a mad amount of free addons available (see vbulletin.org). You should absolutely not pay someone to do this for you, it is so easy. If you want, you can pay a little extra and get vbSEO which is a clever seo package using redirects and the like to make your forum nice and google friendly.

other than the costs that chris mentions there isnt much additional costs except hosting and if like me you have pretty much unlimited traffic package then that shouldnt be a prob really.

I run adsense and although my forum isnt even active yet, I have made $80 (woot!) from people just passing by so add a little adsense and offset it against hosting - you can make a fortune if you get busy . (example: http://www.madmash.com/forums/cool-h...fly-plane.html)

p.

[dave_finlayson]

Yep, vBulletin for me. Chris's prices aren't really correct up to there though. You can lease it yearly for £48.00 including updates for the year or buy a copy for £91 with further updates after the year costing about £20. The £170 is for phone support and so far in my experience this really isn't needed as their support ticket system is excellent. Having said that, if it's a big forum, it may be worth that extra reassurance!