Is A Forum/Message Board Worthwhile?
The reason I am writing this is because everyone seems to be starting forums lately. For those of you who remember, I used to run a forum on this website and back in the day I had over 60 members with thousands of posts. As with all good things it came to an end and after the forum hadn’t been used for months I took it down when I changed hosting providers.
So is a forum on a site like this worth it? In my opinion, no. Thanks to blogging software like WordPress people can leave messages and with sites like Facebook the need for a forum has dwindled. Every day over on the Digital Point forums people are complaining that their forums are not getting any new members but the reason for this is simple. A forum will only attract members if it offers something interesting and is unique. For example a car club, musician, webmaster related could prove quite popular if its unique.
If you have a few members regularly posting then more and more will join as a lot of the time it will spread via word of mouth (thats how my old forum got quite popular).
I have recently created a new forum on a site I run which has been getting a few members join up. For privacy reasons I am not going to give the link out but thanks to some clever marketing and SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) it is ranking very well in Google. Luckily I found a niche not yet covered by those millions of forums out there already so I could be onto a winner in a few months times.
For those of you wanting to create forums on your personal website – don’t waste your time. Forums unless they are already established and have lots of active members are being overshadowed by MySpace, Facebook and MSN. A lot of forums on personal sites (Shoemoney.com for example) have been closed due to lack of interest.
Please feel free to comment 
Haha! Funny you should mention this one because I’ve had a few forums in my time and none have ever really had traffic that was worth the effort put into creating the forum in the first place.
I created one for my own personal coding site, but as the site didn’t get traffic, neither did the forum so it was completely pointless. I’ve found that ‘discussion boards’ (as they are becoming more popularly known) are only really wrothwhile if you get a lot of people asking about your site, or about the content within. A good start is a comments section so you know how many people use the information you provide. If you deem that there are enough comments then maybe a forum is necessary, but until that point it really is viable in a lot of cases these days.