What would be some tips for new forum owners that you would suggest or advise?
My twopenneth.
Starting a new forum now is much harder than it used to be, mostly because you’re competing with the lazy convenience of Facebook groups, Reddit, Discord, and so on. So you can’t just knock a forum up because a topic “seems popular”. That just won’t work today, unless you get especially lucky with the niche.
The single biggest requirement, I’d say, is genuine passion. If you don’t care enough to live and breathe the niche, you’ll run out of steam long before the forum reaches critical mass.
Forums take time, repetition, and dogged, stubborn consistency. Without that driving passion, it’s basically a slow-motion failure, and before too long; you’ll be talking to yourself, or hiring some of those bots you mentioned.
Your forum has to be more than “a place to chat”. The chat comes later. It needs to become the best information hub in the niche. That means:
- Publishing genuinely useful articles, guides, FAQs, and evergreen resources (not bot fluff).
- Staying on top of news, releases, and developments in your niche, so Facebook groups are discussing your content.
- Posting quickly enough that when people are buzzing about something in Facebook groups, your forum already has the thread, the explainer, the resource, the checklist, or the “here’s what you need to know” summary. That's the sort of thing people will link to in those Faceache groups.
In other words, at the beginning you’re not building “a forum”. You’re building a friendly, go-to reference site for that niche community. Just be aware that the 'forum' is the social layer and information exchange on top or your reference site. Eventually, people will join up and join in and you have your community. That's when the work really starts!
