What made you make your first forum?

[GT3Forum]

Simple question, curious to know what peoples original thoughts were and their current thoughts after having some experience with forums. :yes:

What made you make your first?

Looking back, what would you have done differently?

 

[CBI Web]

I was an admin of a forum for a software company that I was the webmaster for. The company suddenly closed their doors one day, and within a few hours I put up a new forum for all the refugees that suddenly had no place to hang out and/or get support for the software. It was meant to be a temporary solution while the company decided what they were going to do. They ended up selling to another company, so I ended up with a permanent forum which still stands today. It's not very busy, but it survives!

 

[GT3Forum]

^^^ Very interesting! Thanks for sharing. Any plans to keep it alive?

 

[CBI Web]

Yes, actually I'm in the early stages of breathing new life into it. It's been sitting there for about 4 years basically in a coma, LOL. In the near future I'll be looking for serious minded techie type folks to become regular members and possibly even staff.

 

[Ashley]

I was on a Backstreet Boys forum called Backstreet.net in 2007 that was run by one of the singer's Dads. Sadly the site had shut down and I was hunting around for other BSB forum hangouts. Whether it was run by the parents of the group, the guys themselves, or by fellow fans it didn't matter to me. Then, sometime in 2008, inspiration struck to make my own forum. I was screwing around on Google one afternoon and randomly started typing whatever keywords came to mind. A couple results that showed up in the search engine seemed kind of interesting, so I decided to check them out. One such site was Forum Advertiser (formerly owned and managed by Theezy). However, that site had a much bigger memberbase than Backstreet did, so the site as a whole took some getting used to in terms of activity. The activity on backstreet.net was fairly steady, but FA was pretty much on the verge of getting as active as this forum is. Not really liking the sounds of that at the time (now it doesn't bother me so much) I started typing in keywords like "forums" or later "forum hosts" after reading some topics on FA. One host I ran across was ForuMotion. Curiosity getting the better of me at the time, I decided to check FM out. Not knowing jack about forum security, different softwares, etc. I was a complete newb and just wanted a host that was easy to work with. FM at the time seem to fit the bill perfectly. I set to work, creating categories and forums (after spending time screwing around in the ACP just trying to figure out what's what!) I came out with cattegories/forum names with whatever sounded good to me. My site was a general discussion forum called Marie 1988 (and no, it's not the site I have now. Totally new database on a seriously different host). As time wore on, I knew something wasn't right. FM always seemed to be down for so called "updates" that obviously couldn't be saved for a rainy day, and I was bombarded with PMs and emails asking why we were down practically every weekend. I had no clue what to say! How do you explain to your members of your first ever forum that all this pathetic downtime isn't your fault?

If I could go back to August/September of 2008, there're a number of things I'd do differently. My current site is called Marie 1988 and it's a general discussion community, so I don't think I'd change anything about that. But some things I would change:

1. I would create content and take advantage of post exchanges and whatever instead of advertising a forum with no posts.

2. I would "do my homework" if you would, on what kinds of hosts were out there. For instance, I could've asked on FA or here what the best possible free hosts were rather than signing up for the first one that showed up on a search engine. I would've also read customer/client reviews on potentially promising hosts rather than jumping head first into it.

I would've hedl my site open longer than 2 weeks/months and wouldn't have done that stupid open shut game all these years.

 

[GT3Forum]

Wow, thanks for sharing Brian Fan. Pretty cool story you have there. I wish you the best of luck with Marie 1988!

 

[mav3n]

It was odd actually,

I was making a website, not a forum, and my friend Im'd me and asked if he could be a staff member on the site. I was like no because this website doesn't allow that. I thought about ForuMotions staff and how it was a forum. So I made an account and made my first first. While it wasn't the best looking thing on the face of the Earth, it was my first tech forum.

 

[Ashley]

Wow, thanks for sharing Brian Fan. Pretty cool story you have there. I wish you the best of luck with Marie 1988!

No problem, mate. We've been through hell and back but it's all been worth it really.

 

[Chadook]

Since i joined Super Mario Flash, i discovered that they are running a successful Project, i thought of creating my own, i created "Super Mario Deep in 2009, few years later, i resumed FTON's project.i ran my first FTON forum on 23/12/2012, after many changes and moving from host to host, i met a generous friend who decided to help me with the technical stuff of phpBB3

 

[YTHelpers]

It wasn't my idea, but I helped a friend setup one of the earlier versions of the vBulletin 3.x series for a car community they wanted to establish. I didn't really stick around with it, but I helped get it off its feet.

I liked playing around with the software and learning what you could do with it, but I didn't really get into it.

 

[JemBuzz]

I joined the Sky News forum years ago. That closed down (flame wars & hacking) and a group of posters created our own forumotion site thereafter.

Last year, I got tired of the usual forum format and functionality and wanted to start an IT project to keep me occupied while I work (I am an investor manager by trade).

I created a site (from scratch) that allows users to:

- create their own subscription base and moderate their own threads (creating a sub forum within a forum)

- broadcast a news article or blog/magazine (I'm trying to get Google News to index at the moment)
- and have the usual surveys/polls, questionnaires (e.g. Myer Briggs Test), promote events, etc.

All using a 'dashboard effect'.

Done the development. I'm now here, trying to learn how to build a membership. Any help will be appreciated.

http://jembuzz.com

 

[cpvr]

I created my first forum because I wanted to try something new and see if anyone else shared similar interests to me. Two years later, we now have over 3k members and 150k posts.

 

[Ghost]

Note: Statute of limitations apply on all criminal references here.

I began my internet life in elementary school when I was roaming around the AOL chatrooms.
I ended up getting banned for using a swear word. I later found out that this was a hacker, using a backend to 'blacklist' anyone they want. My whole family lost their accounts.

From there, I wanted to learn what it was all about. I got involved with some hackers. Among those hackers, I saw quite a few people go to prison for internet crimes. Among those were hackers that got into the internal databases (/financial databases) for AOL, Comcast, various corporations and random things like the 49ers (Football team).

I thought it was awesome; That was until I learned about social engineering & blackmail by being the victim. Long story short > I was out of an AIM account and so were my friends.
However, it introduced me to several other people.

From there, I got into the whole 'warez' scene which is where I learned about file sharing, P2P software, and file-upload monetization. I also learned a lot about fraud, identity theft, and much more. I was in that scene for quite a while and became a staff member on a huge warez forum (now defunct due to the site closing - Staff were quite disrespected and so the idea was to basically say "Okay screw you guys, we're going home).

So, the warez board closed, and my internet business went dead (they both worked together very closely). I knew I had to do something else. I ended up spending more time on an old forum (by the way, when I say 'board', I mean forum).

The old forum was based around AOL/AIM hacking, exploiting and money-making. So I moved some of my skills there, but only had about 25% of the income that I had on the warez board.
I then started learning about social networking and thus made up for that profit-loss by hacking & selling Myspace accounts.
I also sold advertising packages through Myspace bulletins, wall feeds, and much more. It worked.

However, business died down, I got a life (and a girlfriend) and also developed some addictions (drugs, alcohol etc). I had made forums before, but not seriously.
It was at that point that I got into the world of forums.

So that's why I decided to make my first forum! The great ones were gone, the ones around were boring, and it was time to stop being an online criminal.

Now I've moved on from forums (for the most part, as far as being an admin goes at least), and am now working on blogs, web design, and marketing.

 

[SheepishWolf]

When I made my first forum, it was a place for me and my friends from webkinzinsider.com and another irrelevant forum to hang out without the meany-pants moderators looking over our shoulders. It was made with forumotion. 😳