How To Build A Successful Forum

Cjcrux

'Promotion' Is The Key

Sanguine

MikeJones $50 or so.. I analyzed similar forums for keyword density and picked those

Pollux

Sanguine $50 or so.. I analyzed similar forums for keyword density and picked those

Would you consider your advertisement a success? How many new registered users did you pick up with $50?

Sanguine

Pollux It certainly failed, as I had zero signups. Perhaps my base content was not convincing enough, or the intended audience didn't fit an online forum. Anyway, I quit my endeavors and started Free Flarum instead.

Pollux

Sanguine It certainly failed, as I had zero signups.

That was always my expectation.

Perhaps my base content was not convincing enough, or the intended audience didn't fit an online forum.

I ask myself what would make me register in a forum. And the answer is simple: It's the kind of discussions I could have. If a forum has vivid discussions about interesting topics with funny and thoughtful users I will be tempted to register and participate. If a forum is empty with only a handful unwitty users that write once in a fortnight... no thank you.

So you need good discussions to attract people who could participate in good discussions. But how do you get the whole thing started? That's tough.

One possible path is if you know already a couple of interesting people and they are interested to join a new platform. In this case these people know what to expect even if nothing is visible yet.

Another path is if you yourself can write such an outstanding content, that people are willing to register just to talk with you. Over time discussions between your members will develop too, but in the beginning everything depends of you and you alone.

MikeJones

Pollux that is essentially what I am attempting... Write really good content and hope one or two people join in.

I joined adwords to help speed that up. We shall see!

Pollux

MikeJones

I really like your approach and your dedication, your seek adventure forum is awesome.

Instead of or parallel to adwords I would actively look for people who might be interested to share their trips in your forum. Are you active in other forums yourself? Do you know people from there who could contribute? Funny adventurous people, awesome photographers, people with an enthralling writing style? Try to lure them to your forum. And if the first other users have arrived, care for them, engage with them, show your dedication without looking like a control freak.

MikeJones

Pollux I do participate in one other outdoor forum but I don't want to advertise in there. I don't want them to think I am poaching...

I also participate in reddit a lot and have recieved a lot of traffic from there but no registered users.

Pollux

MikeJones I do participate in one other outdoor forum but I don't want to advertise in there.

Great, and that's not what you should consider. Nobody likes advertisement, not for commercial purposes and not for competing websites. I thought more about people with whome you have developed a personal bond, people you have already contacted by email or other means beside the forum, people you have probably already met in real life.

If you can find three or four other likeminded souls who see your forum as their own project too, that's worth more than twenty people who have registered due to your advertisement. Registration in your forum is not the endpoint. People engaging with meaningful content, people seeing your forum as one of their homes in the internet, people enjoying to engage with you, that's the endpoint. I have one member in my forum I learnt to know in another forum 15 years ago and we still enjoy our conversations.

I like your forum because it has a real purpose (and an interesting one), a foundation for meaningful content, a basis to have fun together. Now you need to find some people who want to share their experience with you. Not a lot of them, but the right ones. Why not ask someone from your family, some of your real life friends, people you have met on one of your trips?

MikeJones

Pollux Thanks for all the great suggestions I will definitely take them to heart and I am glad you like the content I have on Seek Adventure so far!

Prosperous

I like it a lot as well! You've got a good set up @MikeJones so keep up the motivation and your forum will be a success in itself. It sorta reminds me of Bear Grylls, especially with the colour scheming too. ? Good on the eyes and it works really well with the dark theme you've got going.

luceos

MikeJones I'm also consistently intrigued by your forum. Would it be an idea for you to create a dedicated discussion here to work like a blog thread (or use medium) talking about your installation, choices (extensions etc) and hosting? I'm very curious to hear more about experiences people have with Flarum.

Henryson

MikeJones Maybe Your Sign Up Button is Hidden Or Hard To Find, The easier for users to register the better.

MikeJones

After running a Google Ad campaign, I feel like it didn't get any new users to join up and participate.

I have been going to other like sites and participating and slowly building links (trying not to be spammy), I have found a lot of my posts on my site can answer questions people ask on Reddit and have had some success answering questions with links. This has slowly built up the number of searches Seek Adventure has been appearing in.

Since I personally don't click on many Ads on Google myself after searching, I decided to dump that path and try Facebook Ads and create a Facebook page where I will post interesting discussions going on in my Flarum.

I find I click on many more Facebook ads than Google Ads and I think The Facebook ads will better showcase my Photography skills and at least catch some new users eyes while they browse Facebook. RIght now I am just trying a one day "Boosted Post" for $20. Will let you all know how it goes.

You can check out my first Boosted post on my page here: https://www.facebook.com/SeekAdventure

luceos

MikeJones perhaps it would be interesting if you could post to twitter; this could eventually even be automated for every post in a specific tag. Getting traction with an audience might be a slow gain but I think that it might be a very stable source eventually..

MikeJones

luceos I have a twitter account too, haven't had to much luck there but trying all the avenues!

luceos

MikeJones i've also recently discovered http://storychief.io/ which offers an api. You could write there and use their api to sync it to your forum while also publishing articles on medium, twitter, facebook, mail campaigns etc.. There are bound to be alternatives, but getting decent reach is always a fight; tools like these automate your publishing processes and can help you gain traction too.

Oshvam

The best advice I can give you (I manage eight forums with over a million monthly visits, at least) is that if you have WhatsApp, Telegram, or other app chats with people you talk to about your forum's topic, bring them to the forum so your discussions are public (those that should be, of course), and that will generate genuine, original content that meets the needs of real users.

toddie

Sanguine this[1] and this guy[2] argue that you need a basic volume of posts to attract first time visitors, and to do that, you need to create fake identities. What do you think about that?

Worked out for my forum. I run a forum for people who enjoy schizophrenia, so it was perfectly normal for us.

esbeeb 🇨🇦

I asked an AI what the largest Discord communities are, for OpenSource projects. It might be realistic to appeal to these communities' sense of OpenSource values (taking advantage of recent controversy, and shift in sentiment against Discord), to migrate to a Flarum forum instead:

Top 20 Open Source Projects on Discord (by Members)

| Rank | Project | Members | Description |
|------|---------|---------|-------------|
| 1 | RPCS3 | ₄₈₁,000 | Open source PlayStation 3 emulator |
| 2 | OBS Community | ₂₄₄,000 | Open source streaming/recording software |
| 3 | Reactiflux | ₂₂₂,000 | React, Redux, GraphQL community |
| 4 | Home Assistant | ₁₂₆,000 | Open source home automation platform |
| 5 | Vue Land (Vue.js) | ₁₂₂,000 | Vue.js frontend framework community |
| 6 | osu! | ₁₀₆,000 | Open source rhythm game |
| 7 | Electron | ₈₁,000 | Open source desktop app framework |
| 8 | Godot Engine | ₆₄,000 | Open source game engine |
| 9 | Rust Community | ₆₆,000 | Rust programming language |
| 10 | NestJS | ₅₂,000 | Node.js framework |
| 11 | TypeScript Community | ₅₁,000 | TypeScript language |
| 12 | Laravel | ₃₉,000 | PHP framework |
| 13 | Tailwind CSS | ₃₇,000 | CSS framework |
| 14 | Flutter | ₆₁,000 | Google's UI toolkit |
| 15 | Deno | ₁₇,000 | JavaScript runtime |
| 16 | Manim | ₁₇,000 | Mathematical animation engine |
| 17 | JetBrains | ₄₀,000 | IntelliJ platform community |
| 18 | Sentry | ₃₅,000 | Error monitoring platform |
| 19 | Quasar | ₂₈,000 | Vue.js framework |
| 20 | LibreNMS | ₂₀,000 | Network monitoring system |

Key observations:

RPCS3 (PS3 emulator) is the largest with nearly half a million members
OBS Studio is the largest productivity/tool open source project
Game emulators and game engines have massive communities
JavaScript/TypeScript frameworks (React, Vue, NestJS) have very active communities
Home automation (Home Assistant) has a huge community due to DIY enthusiast adoption

Note: These numbers fluctuate constantly as members join and leave. Data gathered from Discord server listings in early 2025.

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