Have you ever wanted to make your own community forum, similar to NGU? Have you ever actually acted on making your forum, or was it just an idea? This 7 step tutorial should push you towards your goal but, also help you out!
1.Decide on a forum topic. Generally most community forums are based around something. For example, many of you refer to NGU as a 'hacking' website. Make sure you have a unique idea though! If its similar to a bigger, more popular forum, not many people will just ditch all there time spent to join you!
2.Find some other people that are interested in building the community with you. Having some people working with you will make things a lot easier, and you will be able to support each other when the going gets tough.
3.Decide on the theme, and find some friends that are interested in working with you on your new community. You will need to decide on a hosting plan for the forum. For example, where to host the website that the forum will be on. There are many free forum hosting providers which will give you a subdomain, such as myhackingforum.????????.???, which will look unprofessional let alone appealing. Alternatively, you can purchase a domain name and hosting from a web host. I strongly suggest a purchased domain because not only will it make your site original, but give your members more of an idea of what the site is about. (Depending on the site name.)
4.Selecting the forum software you want to use. This is probably the most important decision during the creation of the forum. Why? Because it can be hard to switch to a different forum software without losing all your previous forum posts. SMF (simple machines forum) is free. It has very few exploits, meaning it is very secure and is unlikely to be hacked. (You don't want a vulnerable website!) Other popular forum software includes vBulletin and PhpBB. I suggest vBulletin. Why? Because it's the software NGU uses and most of us on this site are used to it! It also looks great IMO.
5.Please, know that installation instructions will be different depending on which forum software you choose, but in most cases, you will have to download and unzip the forum software after downloading it, upload it into the publicly accessible directory of your web server via ftp, and then create a MySQL database for it(If you don't know what that is, I suggest using Google as it can be your best friend, or asking your host provider for instructions on this). The MySQL database is where forum posts and member information will be stored.
6.Have the forum up and running on your website, you can create the boards for the forum. Usually, I tend to keep to a maximum of maybe 10 boards. I Do not suggest having too many off topic discussion areas, just one 'general discussion' area will do your website. If you want, you can add sub-topics such as General videos as well.
7.Before making the forum public, it is a good idea to create maybe two or three threads in each forum area, these threads can basically be the rules, but they can also tell members information about the website. Visitors to the site, and new users, will have somewhere to post, and they will know what to and what not to post!
If you have created a site, I hope these will help your website become big!
Thanks for reading!
1.Decide on a forum topic. Generally most community forums are based around something. For example, many of you refer to NGU as a 'hacking' website. Make sure you have a unique idea though! If its similar to a bigger, more popular forum, not many people will just ditch all there time spent to join you!
2.Find some other people that are interested in building the community with you. Having some people working with you will make things a lot easier, and you will be able to support each other when the going gets tough.
3.Decide on the theme, and find some friends that are interested in working with you on your new community. You will need to decide on a hosting plan for the forum. For example, where to host the website that the forum will be on. There are many free forum hosting providers which will give you a subdomain, such as myhackingforum.????????.???, which will look unprofessional let alone appealing. Alternatively, you can purchase a domain name and hosting from a web host. I strongly suggest a purchased domain because not only will it make your site original, but give your members more of an idea of what the site is about. (Depending on the site name.)
4.Selecting the forum software you want to use. This is probably the most important decision during the creation of the forum. Why? Because it can be hard to switch to a different forum software without losing all your previous forum posts. SMF (simple machines forum) is free. It has very few exploits, meaning it is very secure and is unlikely to be hacked. (You don't want a vulnerable website!) Other popular forum software includes vBulletin and PhpBB. I suggest vBulletin. Why? Because it's the software NGU uses and most of us on this site are used to it! It also looks great IMO.
5.Please, know that installation instructions will be different depending on which forum software you choose, but in most cases, you will have to download and unzip the forum software after downloading it, upload it into the publicly accessible directory of your web server via ftp, and then create a MySQL database for it(If you don't know what that is, I suggest using Google as it can be your best friend, or asking your host provider for instructions on this). The MySQL database is where forum posts and member information will be stored.
6.Have the forum up and running on your website, you can create the boards for the forum. Usually, I tend to keep to a maximum of maybe 10 boards. I Do not suggest having too many off topic discussion areas, just one 'general discussion' area will do your website. If you want, you can add sub-topics such as General videos as well.
7.Before making the forum public, it is a good idea to create maybe two or three threads in each forum area, these threads can basically be the rules, but they can also tell members information about the website. Visitors to the site, and new users, will have somewhere to post, and they will know what to and what not to post!
If you have created a site, I hope these will help your website become big!
Thanks for reading!
