I'm running a number of forums, based on my experience, I can only tell you that it's extremely hard to build a successful forum, think it again, and again. I strongly suggest you start from a content site such as a blog, when you have lots of visitors, you can test the water. Nowdays, most forums were closed after a couple of years. My most sucessuful forum is a

Ok, I can see some of the replies here aren't by people who have either actually ran a forum or attempted to and failed. I'm going to try and explain to you the best way to get a forum 'running'. However, actually get traffic and active members is a whole different ball game. First, forget phpBB or MyBB and all those other 'Free' forum solutions. They tend to be buggy and have many security issues since they are open source; if your not adept to dealing with security on a forum you'll want the easiest one to maintain security wise. I would suggest vBulletin, it's not cheap but the usability, functionality and security are 'Well' worth the cost; not to mention a huge community of users behind it. You'll need to then figure out how popular your forum is going to be, most shared hosting servers cannot host a forum for long; they need a lot of space for the database and use alot of the serves resources. You'll probably want to start off with a dedicated server, a low level one, but a server none the less that is dedicated only to your forum. Think of how stressful it will be when your forum is 'blocked' on the shared hosting and you have to find a solution while your active members see your forum as disabled or down; this is how many forums fail in the first place. Once you've actually gotten a hold of vBulletin and set it up on a low end dedicated server you'll want to either hire someone to make a custom template, you'll want a unique look and feel on your board and related to your boards topic. Make sure to install any modifications or additional tools you want on your board before you promote it and make it active. Try to avoid making to many different forum sections at the start, make only 3 or 4 until the forum gets popular and expand as needed. You'll end up need to make fake accounts and posting threads yourself and replying to yourself at the start, this helps promote an active forum, no matter how weird it sounds. Make sure to have all anti-spam measures in place prior to going live, use an advanced captcha tool and perhapes limit PM's to after a specific amount of posts. I'd also consider limiting live urls for the first few posts as well. Below are more resources to learn about a forum and getting started. http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=282466.0http://ezinearticles.com/?8-Tips-for-Starting-and-Maintaining-a-Successf...http://www.articlealley.com/article_13064_14.htmlhttp://www.freshbooks.com/blog/2007/02/12/tips-for-starting-a-forum/ Message Edited by NicoleD on 06-29-2009 09:40 AM

The easiest thing to do is to open an account from a hosting company. I use hostgator, there's other ones out there as well.   Once done, you can easily install a forum from within your account. 90% of the process is completely automated, so it is relatively easily to do so.   Usually, you have the choice of installing many kinds of forums, but PHPbb is one of the most popular and there are tons of themes avaialble to download and customize your forum.

On the technical end of things, there are many solutions out there to get a forum up and running. Some are totally free, some are hosted, some are 'enterprise level' (for lack of a better descriptor). Vanilla is a popular piece of forum software right now, as is the venerable PhpBB. Both are free to download and use. Just so you also realize what an online community is really about, check out this post over at Boagworld: '7 harsh truths about running online communities'. He has some really good points about what it takes to run a successful online community.