Forums.

[Nick C]

I'm experimenting with the idea of running a forum, tied to our shop. The idea is to have a database of questions/answers and of course additional advertising, especially as the search engines seem to love forums.

I run a forum on another website that's non commercial, but I wonder if any of you folks run commercial forums and what are the pro's and con's of doing so?

[Darren B]

over on the other side myself and Gabe run a forum but this is not commecial although is for ecommerce, but i can tell you that administering new users is probably the biggest problem. Within a month or so of setting up you will have more porn site links that you could ever possibly look at.

Before we launched this we discussed the work involved in managing one and as this grows it will certainly start to consume time. But moderators are key, although carefully selecting one that will "moderate" they same way as you is not easy.

You have to allow people to say what they feel but obviously with ground rules inplace, you cant have a forum that is oneside either.

hope this helps

[Nick C]

It does Darren, I run another forum and know the hassle that spam causes. I'd most likely just administrate myself (edit: by myself, I already administrate myself )

[jont]

I already administrate myself

Your not married then?

[Cheapprices4u]

ive moderated a lot of forums over the years, the admins NEED the mods
without it expect a lot of work

i have setup a few forums but time is the killer

Darren where is this world(forum) you speak of?

[Nick C]

To be honest Gareth I don't think we'll see a lot of members, although we are noticing a large shift to an online customer base, so I may be proved wrong. I'll happily moderate for the time being.

Jont, you've got it in one!

[Darren B]

Darren where is this world(forum) you speak of?

Its on the dark side

[Mike Hughes]

Its on the dark side

Shheesh. Talk about selling.......

Mike