Ultimate Forum Guide
This thread will not tell you where to tell you anything about hosting or where to buy domains.
Domain
Your domain is a very important, thing, it is one of the first things your visitors see when they go to your website. When you are thinking of your domain, you don't want it to look unprofessional. So you will need to save up a bit of money and buy a .net or .com domain. (I prefer .net for forums) So, if your forum is called 'Death Forums', your domain would be something along the lines of.... deathforums.net or death-forums.net. If you use free hosting and get a domain like 'x.webs.com', your site will look unprofessional and people will probably not like it. This is because you haven't spent money to make your forum better! I usually don't bother with forums that don't have a good domain.
Forum Soft-ware
The most popular forum software include MyBB, XenForo, BulletinBB, phpbb and warez. Picking the right forum software for you is very important! You must pick something that is high quality and flexible. In my opinion, you should go with MyBB. Why? Custom themes which are fully customizable and many HQ free ones can be found. You can make your own custom and exclusive plugins for your forum, and sell them to other people. You can download other peoples ones too to improve your forum. Everything works well and I find that it's the best software. Hackforums and Supportforums (and many others) use MyBB.
MyBB Website
http://mods.mybb.com/mods
http://mods.mybb.com/themes
Niche
Niches are important for your forum to succeed. You need a 'topic' to the forum to make it more interesting. Like hackforums is for hacking and supportforums is for support. You need to think of a new and unique niche that you know will succeed! Some ideas are a market forum, gaming forum, general chat forum and maybe a hacking forum. (which are not allowed to be showcased or advertised on HF) Take your time picking one of these, really, don't rush this step. It is the thing that will make your forum way more popular.
Theme
Your theme is the thing that makes your forum look beautiful and that makes it stand out from the others. Hackforums' theme is fairly simple but looks VERY good. You can browse through various forums to find some free themes to put onto your site. Find a good one! However, if you have about $50 to spare, you can buy a nice, custom theme from a graphics designer, look for one here on this forum or look around for other websites that will do it. (Search up Audentio Design) You also need smilies to be made, they are the thing you see on the left when making a thread or making a post (not a quick reply).
Staff & Rules
To be a clean forum that has no issues with the 'justice' system, you need to set global rules for all sections of the forum, around 10 rules or so. Then you need to go through and set forum-specific rules for each section. You need a at-least 1 admin and 1 global mod with a few sectional moderators depending on how many forums you have added! Be strict about the rules and don't let any slip by because they have donated or something. Treat all members equally and as a staff member (or forum owner), don't break the rules of your own forum!
Plugins - Requires MyBB
Plugins are a useful thing that can help you and members out, a lot. They can make life a lot easier when browsing the forum by removing annoying things and adding cool things. They can stop people trying to spam the forum or hack it. A list of plugins will be added here soon, please wait!
Heaps more will soon be added, please be patient :)
You can help out if you want. Suggest anything if you'd like
