How to Create a Free Ad-Supported Forum
A forum can be a great way to create a sense of community among the visitors to your website or to gather other people who share your interests. Hosting a forum on your own server, especially a popular one, can use a lot of bandwidth and be very expensive. The alternative is to set up a free forum hosted by another company, such as ProBoards, ForumsPlace or Yuku. Such forums are free to create and use, and are supported by advertising, often in the form of banner ads or pop-up ads. Ad-supported forums usually restrict objectionable content.
Other People Are Reading
Instructions
-
-
1
Select a provider to host your free forum. You can choose one of the forums mentioned above or select a different one. Look over the terms of service and privacy policy for the forum host that you want to use to make sure you are in agreement with the rules for using their service.
-
2
Create a new account with the forum host. Choose your community name carefully; this is usually permanent and can't be changed once it is selected.
-
-
3
Login to your account and open your administration control panel. This is where you can control every aspect of your forum. From the administration panel you can change the appearance of your forum, create new sub-forums, manage users and view forum statistics.
-
4
Change the look of your forum. Most forum hosts include multiple pre-made layouts and color schemes for you to choose from, and often allow you to customize the appearance with HTML as well.
-
5
Create new categories and sub-forums. Categories can be used to separate sub-forums of a similar nature for easier navigation. For example, you may want to create an "Off Topic" category with forums for general discussion, pop culture or anything that doesn't fit with the topic of the message board.
-
6
Promote users to help you manage the forum. If your forum attracts a lot of traffic, you can promote trusted users to the role of moderator or administrator to help you manage spam and enforce your message-board rules.
-
1
