I have built the community at http://pdaPhoneHome.com using vBulletin and a portal hack - vBindex. I started with phpBB, but eventually found that it was too tough to do what I needed in it, and couldn’t be happier with vBulletin. The site has become quite active with 100-200 people on most of the time. The site had its 1 year anniversary this week.
I have to agree with what others have said. I takes a ton of time and persistence to grow. It is very much a chicken and egg thing where you won’t get people to come there unless people are already there. I’ve found that you need about a half dozen dedicated users to post everyday in a forum… sticking with it for a while, and then other people will join in. It is nearly impossible to do it with one or two people… just doesn’t stick. You also have to find a niche that isn’t already covered.
http://www.Smartclickz.com is a community forums which me and my cousin work on right now. It is a bit new but we r getting lots members everydays.
The reason it getting bigger and bigger cuz of rich content, and besides that We provide Free webpolls, free forums, free guestbooks.
Btw, members can also come to our site and add their link to our directory.
http://WebmasterGoods.com started out as a webmaster auctions site and it was really really hard to get people to join because there were not many auctions and there were not many buyers. I SEOed it to be on google #1 for “webmaster auctions” and i get a tiny bit of traffic from there. I get most of my traffic though from posting on forums with a sig link. We now have auctions, link directory, forums, traffic direct, SE submission, tutorials, articles, a newsletter and we are adding in the near future webstores, proxy bidding. and later on we will be adding PMing between members (not for sure yet), Web Hosting, Logo Design, Web Design
128 bit Secure Certs, SEO, and free templates.
I think its quality and look of the site that is one of the key features to a community. Also you MUST MUST have ORIGINAL and HELPFUL/USEFUL content or why would anyone have a reason to stay?
I know this is not the type of communtiy that the rest of you have shown but it is nevertheless a community and i think its a rather nice one if anyone wants to say otherwise
My community Bahamas and Caribbean Community is kinda similar to your idea… I’ve been working on it a while but now I want to launch a bigger site with more features… what do all of you think am I ready to expand…
‘I hate my job’ blogging community started about 2 months ago using Drupal.
Submit to dmoz and also optimize hate job keywords to get to top of google.
google pagerank seem to jump after getting listed on dmoz
I have www.TalkScripts.com a scripts discussion forum.
I sent some emails to people i know and expecting to see them sign up.
I think currently all i can do is to get members from other forums.
I don’t know what to do next.
oh yea… talkscripts is doing great and there are a nice bit of helpful people there…even though we had our… uh…differences its still a great community.
http://www.vgchat.com/ Video game message boards. So yah, there teenagers!! It got just below 1,000 posts yesterday alone. During the summer some times it got wel over 2,000 posts a day.
Its 10 mos old, 740 or so members with 2-5 new members/day. Right now the board has a Thanksgiving theme, so the colors look weird.
So far it’s been a lot of fun. The site has a built-in picture uploader to allow people to post pix of their pets and that has been very popular.
There have been downsides - pet topics often get very emotional, especially around the subjects of breeding and feeding, but I have a couple of great mods who are much more diplomatic than myself and can diffuse situations when they come up.
On our site www.glasgowapollo.com we contacted radio stations, national press, music press and posted messages on relavent news groups. We got a 10 minute interview on Radio Scotland which saw the site hits jump a little that day.
Plus we submitted the site to Google, and all the rest of the major free web search engines and directories.
We offered links to other sites who are related in some way to what we do.
Just been open a little more than a month with 14members. I’m having trouble getting traffic to the site, but I also havent done research due to time constraints with school. How did other people get traffic during the begining months?
Its a true webhosting and domain name marketplace, all set to launch in a weeks to 10 days time. Its a meeting place for both buyers and sellers of the webhosting and domain name industry.
We are using VB and bought a skin from Vbulletinstyles.com which I customised.
The forum discusses all aspects of life in Amsterdam (Holland) so we started promoting the site on news groups about travel, hemp, drugs, gay scene etc. We have had an amazing response so far.
We noticed that alot of people were browsing the site without registering so we changed the forum permissions so the users could view the forum threads but if they wanted to read the posts then they had to sign up.
I’m also looking out for forum moderators now and anyone wishing to join my team are very welcome. In return if I chose you as a mod you will get unlimited advertising in my 5 networked sites ranging from hosting, emailing, dating, betting and gaming.
