Starting a New Forum Website

TheFoxRocks

New member
Hey guys and gals,

I was hoping this community could help me. I have been reading on here a little to try and figure things out and understand that some things have recently changed with the XenForo platform if I understand correctly. I am nearly new to website design and the only way I can accomplish it is with software that helps you do so. I took some Dreamweaver and it is just not something I wanted to invest a lot of time learning. That brings me to my first question.

If it helps I would love my website to be similar to www.lawnsite.com for reference.

1.) If I reserve my own website with a domain provider can I simply implement the XenForo software/client over my website or do I need to lease my website at XenForo? I have no clue how this works.

2.) I am making this community because I and others see a need for it. However, with time I hope that I will be able to generate ad revenue and I heard that using XenForo has big advantages in this category. Is this true?

3.) I guess my final question is whether or not this is something that one person with limited knowledge will be able to figure out? Like most websites I plan to appoint moderators and such to help out but I guess a lot of the work will come from me using the software.

4.) Also I would like to know about cost, I did a little research and saw the plans seem to start at $60.00 a month. I saw there is also free software available as well. So could I start out with the free software and achieve what I want and if I begin to get more traffic or expand will I be able to easily transition?

You guys do not need to answer every question. It would be great if you knew something about a particular topic and shed some light on it for me. I appreciate any aid in advance.
 
I am fairly confident that if I make a good first impression with the website it will thrive. Like I was mentioning in my previous post that you probably did not see yet. We are a large growing number of people (equipment owners without saying much more) that have no real home so to say.

I agree, for $60 a month, maybe an additional $12-15 a year for the domain, it seems worth it to give this a try, especially if you have a 10,000 users base already.
 
I agree, for $60 a month, maybe an additional $12-15 a year for the domain, it seems worth it to give this a try, especially if you have a 10,000 users base already.

To be honest, I do not know how many I will get. However, the Facebook group has close to 10,000 now and I know there are others that refuse to use it and stick to websites where they can post their topic. It is 100% a growing community as well.

So to start off I would buy my domain name from a service (such as HostGator etc) and then purchase the $60.00 version of XenForo and begin to put my site together? I realize this is obviously ridiculously oversimplified but this is basically where I start? Once I have my domain reserved how do I implement the XenForo software over it? I am guessing this is a tutorial here somewhere to get started with it?
 
To be honest, I do not know how many I will get. However, the Facebook group has close to 10,000 now and I know there are others that refuse to use it and stick to websites where they can post their topic. It is 100% a growing community as well.

So to start off I would buy my domain name from a service (such as HostGator etc) and then purchase the $60.00 version of XenForo and begin to put my site together? I realize this is obviously ridiculously oversimplified but this is basically where I start? Once I have my domain reserved how do I implement the XenForo software over it? I am guessing this is a tutorial here somewhere to get started with it?

I self host, so I don't know what the process is. But it shouldn't be all that difficult, once you purchase the XenForo plan, you'll be able to open tickets for official XF support. The XF team should be able to help get you squared away.

As for the users, just think of board incentives. Of course you want to encourage discussions to be done there, but think of other features you can implement to show how much more people can do on the new XF site versus the limitations of Facebook groups.
 
To be honest, I do not know how many I will get. However, the Facebook group has close to 10,000 now and I know there are others that refuse to use it and stick to websites where they can post their topic. It is 100% a growing community as well.

So to start off I would buy my domain name from a service (such as HostGator etc) and then purchase the $60.00 version of XenForo and begin to put my site together? I realize this is obviously ridiculously oversimplified but this is basically where I start? Once I have my domain reserved how do I implement the XenForo software over it? I am guessing this is a tutorial here somewhere to get started with it?
I am not sure since I don't use XenForo cloud, but it is most likely a CNAME entry that you add for with a record pointing to XenForo. It will then redirect to your site. I personally use Namecheap + Cloudflare to protect my site and they're reasonably priced. Not sure if I'm allowed to name specific companies but that's what I use.
 
Of course you want to encourage discussions to be done there, but think of other features you can implement to show how much more people can do on the new XF site versus the limitations of Facebook groups.

Yes, yes is there a place here maybe someone recalls where I could read about the various advantages a XenForo site would hold over a Facebook group? This is obviously a boast I already thought about to get people to navigate.

I think I already mentioned it but my biggest obstacle is bringing people together from the various websites, Facebook and YouTube and showing them having our own community on a website is what we need.
 
Yes, yes is there a place here maybe someone recalls where I could read about the various advantages a XenForo site would hold over a Facebook group? This is obviously a boast I already thought about to get people to navigate.

I think I already mentioned it but my biggest obstacle is bringing people together from the various websites, Facebook and YouTube and showing them having our own community on a website is what we need.

That's something you have to work on, since most forums are different based on what features they have. XF has over 2000 available addons which can change and add new functions to the base XenForo.

You might want to double check and see if addons are available yet for XenForo Cloud, it wasn't immediately available in its early stages. I don't know if it is yet. If it's not, then that'll be a plus for self hosting.

But it's more technical work.

Just to toss some ideas your way, if your site is willing to do some giveaways, maybe as a celebration of the site launch or other events; require users to participate by 'liking' an announcement post, or voting in a poll. That'll force them to sign up in order to get in on it.
 
I am also looking at the look for what you originally posted. It looks like mostly website themes correct? So when people first visit, my site is not a dull white webpage with a crap load of text asking for more text?

What you're seeing here on this XF support forum, is the default style, so just imagine the main forum page: https://xenforo.com/community/

With only 1 user account, you. With 1 forum category, and 1 forum as an example.

No other users, no posts, etc. So it's not entirely white. You can then log into your Admin CP, you can download some free styles here to upload to it, to test and play around for fun, or purchase one that you know want, and take it from there.
 
Actually I might have, I played around with it very little before work one day. I should have had more time to sit down with it though. I was turned off because I really could not figure anything out but that was more lack of time than anything.

Maybe spend a bit more time and give it another try. Did you also visit XenForo's youtube channel? https://www.youtube.com/user/XenForo/videos
There's many videos to show you how things are done. Demo might be a little limiting though, so just be aware of that. It doesn't provide you 100% full access versus a paid one. But it does give you a general feel of it.
 
Two things I see with Cloud that you may want to consider is the 500,000 pageview limit. Depending on how active it is, you may reach that limit, especially if you anticipate 10,000 users. Also, 50GB of storage isn't that much space. You can disable people uploading attachments but those are two things to also consider.

Yeah so what does this mean? Because 50GB isn't a lot at all. If people are posting pictures (I anticipate a whole lot) I am going to hit 50GB in what a single day? So you get 50GB before it starts erasing old content or something?

I do not expect all 10,000 users to come over all at once, but I am hoping with time I will have a lot more than even that. I have no way of knowing for sure though.
 
Yeah so what does this mean? Because 50GB isn't a lot at all. If people are posting pictures (I anticipate a whole lot) I am going to hit 50GB in what a single day? So you get 50GB before it starts erasing old content or something?

I do not expect all 10,000 users to come over all at once, but I am hoping with time I will have a lot more than even that. I have no way of knowing for sure though.
I am not sure if you can purge old attachments. It depends on how many they upload and the resolution
 
Yeah so what does this mean? Because 50GB isn't a lot at all. If people are posting pictures (I anticipate a whole lot) I am going to hit 50GB in what a single day? So you get 50GB before it starts erasing old content or something?

I do not expect all 10,000 users to come over all at once, but I am hoping with time I will have a lot more than even that. I have no way of knowing for sure though.

Nah you won't, one of mine is growing around 8gb per year. You can of course set limits to the attachments. Size limits, and file type. Allow image types only, remove music & video formats. I believe the default allows them, so definitely change those.

You won't have to worry about it right away, if you can attract so many users to even grow a few gigs per day, I'd consider that a good problem.
 
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Nah you won't, one of mine is going around 8gb per year. You can of course set limits to the attachments. Size limits, and file type. Allow image types only, remove music & video formats. I believe the default allows them, so definitely change those.

You won't have to worry about it right away, if you can attract so many users to even grow a few gigs per day, I'd consider that a good problem.
If they're coming from FaceBook or other social media sites, I'd assume they'd be discouraged by image uploading limits.

But disabling audio and video formats is always a good idea.
 
If they're coming from FaceBook or other social media sites, I'd assume they'd be discouraged by image uploading limits.

But disabling audio and video formats is always a good idea.
I have mine on 8mb and no size limit, I actually wanted the images to be uploaded at full size. Seems to be doing okay so far, the largest images I can see average 5mb, and no one complained yet.
 
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