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How expensive is it to add a message board to an existing website?

cbn

cbn

Lifer
I am just wondering how much it would cost to add a very simple V-bulletin message board to an existing website?

http://www.forumdr.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-run-a-forum/864/

I found that link above which makes the situation look fairly affordable (with the exception of point #3), but then I notice lots of non-profit and community based websites will leave out the discussion board? (Which to me is a shame because a lot of good ideas could be exchanged on a open forum).
 
Anywhere from "Really Really" To "Not so much".

I've launched one for a personal site that cost only my time to set things up. However, maintenance, customization, and hosting fees can be quite expensive for high traffic sites. It all depends on what you want to do.

Forums are semi-useful. We see all how great Anandtech forums are, however, for every site like anandtech there are 1000s of unoccupied forums. Attracting people to your niche of the internet is hard. You have to figure that for every 100 people that visit your website, maybe 1 or 2 will be willing to join your forum. So if you are only pulling in traffic on the order of 100 per month a forum is going to fail. (This all depends on the community of course.)
 
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From the link, all you really need is point #1 (hosting) and point #2 (a forum package). Point #3 and the rest are all "optional". If you already have an existing website, then you already have hosting. The hosting server needs to be able to support whatever forum package you want to deploy.

As mentioned in point #2, some forum packages don't cost anything. Deployment and administration can be tricky, however, which is probably why some sites that need forums don't have them.
 
Or you could use free software like simple machines. Granted not as nice as vb but it is free, as in beer and its open source.
 
You can get free forum software, and you can get really professional forum software. In all cases you need to be savvy enough with script and databases to be able to customize the forums and add them into your existing site in a homogeneous way. Setting up the layout and styling to your existing site look and feel are probably the most time-consuming aspects, and if you don't have the skills to do these things it will be fairly expensive. Figure you'll pay someone $25-40 an hour to do it for you. Setting up the forums, options, permissions, etc., is usually accomplished through the forum web front-end, but will also be time-consuming.

Forums will not add significantly to your bandwidth requirements unless very successful, and the same goes for database space. They will add to the daily maintenance overhead since if you get any visibility at all you're going to get people spamming them and trying to hack them regularly. And if you have a sizable community the population on your boards is going to need oversight, and that takes a lot of time too.

You didn't ask, but I'll follow Cogman's lead and suggest that there are only two reasons to go to the trouble: 1) you have a strong interest group and a desire to provide the community a home and possibly monitize views in the future; and 2) you have a need to provide online support to customers or clients. In the latter case sometimes a FAQ+email is better than a forum. Depends on your business.

[Edit: if you want to get your feet wet you can set up a free, hosted board on a number of sites, and then link to it from yours. The downside is that you accept them placing ads on the page.]
 
In regards to software / install for a small time user:

if your web host has fantastico (included in hosting price) and you like the offered bulletin board then it will take about 5 min to install (point click, follow wizard prompts) then you can choose if you want to customize it.

here is an example of a $0, 5 min install: http://eeprojects.com/forums/
 
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Markbnj said:
2) you have a need to provide online support to customers or clients. In the latter case sometimes a FAQ+email is better than a forum.
Click to expand...

So true. One reason is that everybody that is in the boat of course wants as much work done on the product as possible. Hence the company needs to sell the product and if possible customers could see all the issues on the forums, that would scare them away.

Another option: Can't you start with one of those forum hosters that offer you free, pre-installed forums? You could then link to it form your page (should also be possible to "integrate" but I'm not a html viz). I know not ideal but you can get away for free (if you allow banners, but which sane person does not have add-block anyway?). Setup is very easy too. if it takes off, you could still do it in a more fancy way.
 
There are a LOT of factors into deciding what a board would cost. If it's low traffic, you already have web hosting, then your only cost would be the license cost, and the time it took you to set up the board.

Now you can add on costs such as the design, implementation, managing it yourself (time cost), etc, etc...

EDIT : on the free forums idea ... you can get smf, phpbb, etc ... there are a lot of very good forums out there, if you do not want to drop the money on a vbulletin license. You can also convert your free board later on, vbulletin has a lot of import scripts to make it pretty simple.
 
Is there are reason you didn't want phpBB? It's probably the second-most-common board I see in use, after vBulletin.
 
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