How To Create a Web Forum

Choose a topic or central theme and focus for your web forum. Most web forums have a central focus, theme or subject. For example if you are an avid sports fan you may want to make a forum focused on your favorite sports and the different teams within that sport to draw others together to stimulate conversation and to grow and expand the community.

Sign up for a free account with ProBoards or with Boards2Go. These sites offer you tools and hosting to create your web forum and to give it a professional look as well as helpful organizational tools. All you need to sign up is some basic information and a valid email address.

Log-in to your account as the administrator. As the administrator of the forum, you will be able to control who is allowed to become a member of your forum, the overall look, design, and organization of the forum, as well as being able to select moderators to help you run the forum.

Create separate boards for each subdivision of your main topic. For example, if you are doing a forum on sports, you will want to have a separate board on the forum for football, baseball and basketball. This will help you to keep your web forum from becoming cluttered and hard to follow. Simply click on the Create Board tab in the administration area, create your board and name it.

Create categories in each of the boards you create. Categories are also subdivisions of the boards that go in even deeper into the particular topic. Continuing with the sports example, let's say you want to have separate discussion areas for college football, professional football and high school football, all under the football board. By creating each of those as a separate category you will be able to organize and keep separate discussions about each of those topics within the larger topic without causing confusion.

Appoint moderators to help you govern the message board. As you begin to spread the word about your forum and people begin to sign up and interact with each other in discussions, things are bound to get heated. You will need to have others who are on the board that you trust and who regularly contribute to help you keep an eye on things and to also help resolve conflicts. Moderators have the power to ban people who are misusing or disobeying forum rules and can also edit or remove certain conversations that might be inappropriate.

Spread the word about your web forum. Tell all of your friends, family and co-workers about your forum. Have them tell people about your forum as well.