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Create and Grow Your own Forum Using MyBB



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Create and Grow Your own Forum Using MyBB

Many people like to create a unique website or even a blog which they work hard at on a regular basis. We all if not most of us know the ins and outs of creating the blog and filling it with content and then trying to attract the right set of visitors to our blogs. But what about forums? 

There are 1000s if not more online these days in different niches and most are very popular and high demanding at the best of times will millions of members. But how can you create a forum and a successful one at that?

MyBB what is it and Why Use MyBB

Mybb is a forum discussion boards software, allowing members to install on there hosting accounts there own Forum. But why use MyBB when there are many forum software out there. The first thing is that Mybb is easy to use and the second thing is that it is free to use always. Yeah, true some others are free as well and some of you may not agree with me when I say this is the best software because to me it is. 

Not only is it easy to use and install but also easy to add mods and plugins and so much more on creating the perfect forum for you. It is so easy to change layouts and with the extras with great plugins which will help your forum stand out little better with points systems to lottery's and so much more from the Google plugin which helps turn your permalinks into much more SEO friendly links. Mybb as a lot going for them I have used many before and I always go back to Mybb as in my eyes it is one of the best. Apart from a great community of members who are willing to help you when you have a coding problem to any error. There is always help at hand and very helpful they are as well.

Getting Started

Once you install your MyBB forum on your hosting Cpanel, the next thing I usually do is sort out meta descriptions and keywords. Do this by logging into your forum /admin panel, and then go to templates & style. Then down the left side of your panel click templates, then click options next to the theme you are using then expand template. Once you have done this it will bring up a list of template settings, look for Index page templates click to expand and then the top, click edit on Index.

When you enter edit mode you will see similar like you see below:

<html>
<head>
<title>{$mybb->settings['bbname']}</title>
{$headerinclude}

If you want to add manually your meta tags then delete all the above and copy this below:

<html>
<head>
<title>{$mybb->settings['bbname']}</title>
<meta name="Keywords"content="KEYWORDS GO HERE SEPARATE WITH COMMA,">
<meta name="Description"META DESCRIPTION GOES HERE">
{$headerinclude}

All done, great job... So now you have done your descriptions and keywords, also don't forget once this is done it is time to create your forum. But, also make sure you save your settings you just made to the changes of the template. Once you have done then click forums & posts. When the page loads then click, add new forum or edit the demo one to which it starts you off with. Make sure you separate some forums with certain categories if you want an idea what to use. Then google search your niche and type forums as well next to it. Check others forums but do not copy this is meant to be helping you give ideas how you can set yours up I do not suggest copying everything...

The first plugin you should install is the Plugin uploader which is ideal, so you don't have to keep logging into your Cpanel to add plugins. So make sure you download the MyBB plugin uploader follow the instructions with it and place it in the plugins folder in your domain on Cpanel. Once you have done now you can add other plugins through your MyBB administration panel. Go to plugins in the configuration menu and then browse plugins, there is a lot of plugins you can look through the first one you should install after the plugin uploader is plugin library and then Google SEO plugin. Then after them, any plugins you like. Once it is all done now it is time you started creating threads and posts in your forum. Try to create a rules thread and introduction maybe also news and updates. 

Time to Boost Your Forum with members and Content

So now you NEED members, but how to get your forum popular with it being new and not promoted much. Well, now it is time to use Postloop, which is an excellent website which allows members to contribute to blogs and forums and earn points. They can exchange points for cash or use there points to get members to join there blogs or forums and get contributions from members just like you have been doing. 

So join postloop totally free, add your new forum and follow the instructions on how to add your forum. Once all them steps are complete you can either add funds by buying points or earn points by writing content for blogs or forum posting. Once you have points you will notice members joining your forum and creating posts.

Pretty soon enough your forum will eventually be found either google or elsewhere to which also do try promote and share with social media websites and get the traffic. Also, add you domain.com to Google Webmaster tools as this will help with the indexing so you should more or less do this as soon as you finished setting up your forum. Remember to add meta description and try have a catchy name also a unique domain try fewer words as possible.

Good Luck

Comments

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SiamSEO
About mods and such; it's good to remember that they can easily break your site and cause security issues, so you shouldn't go around just installing everything on a whim. While it's likely that you are not able to assess the validity of them yourself, you can ask for help from the community and try to make sure that there's nothing shady going on. Not a surefire way obviously, so remember to keep multiple backups just in case!



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DarthHazard
Yeah, I agree. It's important that you are careful with modifications because sometimes you can break the whole forum which is not great at all especially if you do not have a recent backup to revert to. I think the best thing to do, is to stick with the modifications that are listed on the MyBB community site and stay away from any on any unofficial MyBB sites. That way you will not have any problems because the plugins on the site are checked and made sure that they work well



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vinaya
I don't own a forum, however, once I tried to launch my forum. I had to give up because bringing members and making these members active was really difficult.
When I was building forum, I experimented with various forum scripts, mostly open source scripts like MyBB, PhBB, and SMF. Based on my experience, I can MyBB is a nice forum script. You can easily customize, you do not need prior experience. MyBB is the most used forum script.



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Martinsx1
You can easily boost your forum using the social media and Facebook specifically offers you such features where you can boost your site through your Facebook page to reach more audience that would like join your forum and become your members as long as you have quality content that would interest them.



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vinaya
Yes, we can use social media sites to promote forum and bring members and encourage activities. We can even offer various benefits such as free advertising, free promotion to make the members active. We can even use services like Postloop to build membership and encourage content creation. However, this is easier said than done. I have been using social media to promote my blogs and websites since a long time and I have not benefitted much. Free promotion does not work anymore and you need a big budget to do paid advertising.



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overcast
Yes that seems to be difficult with the phpbb and others. If you use the BBpress plugin on wordpress then also it can be difficult for many features. I'd say it can be a good idea if you know how to process your forum properly like SMF. I have seen that working out for many. I know that some people do use the forum options.



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jpyy
The MyAlerts plugin is also vital. However, it doesn't work automatically with many premium themes. Also, installing is a bit tricky. For one thing, a needed file isn't included in the zip (Don't ask me why. It seems silly.).



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DarthHazard
I love the MyAlerts plugin. Whenever I have a MyBB forum, I always get this, alongside the NewPoints plugin because of how important they are to the forum. In terms of it working with premium themes, I've never experienced any issues with it and I've used a few different free & premium themes with MyBB installations. What file was missing from the zip as well? I've never had any problems with it.



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jpyy
It would be the ClassLoader.php file. Anyway, I can't see how you never noticed it. Maybe you got hold of some zip that had it included. Where did you get your zip file?



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DarthHazard
Well, I probably didn't notice it because I never actually encountered the problem and all the files were always present in the zip that I downloaded. Since it's a free plugin, I always download it from MyBB and nowhere else. All plugins uploaded and available from the MyBB site are always manually approved so you know that they won't have any problems or missing files.



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overcast
I don't have much bias towards Mybb. I have used it and along with fluxbb, phpbb and others. I have found out that fluxbb and SMF seems to be lot better on the forum side. And you can get it to tweak with mods and the updates. I think how you manage those updates and handle some of the issues it depends solely on that. I guess based on what most of the folks do it can be really hard to work with forums and make money off them. Forum handling is lot harder topic in terms of revenue and people.



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DarthHazard
I think you might actually be the first ever person that I have met that actually prefers FluxBB and SMF over MyBB. I can't actually believe it because of how amazing MyBB is. I actually have never bothered to try out FluxBB or SMF (because of how much I love MyBB) so maybe it truly is great. You can actually get a much large choice for modifications and updates with MyBB, by the way.



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Martinsx1
MyBB is among the best forum software which one can set up one's forum on. It offers easy access and quality features that makes such forum to be easily managed without much difficulty.

One thing that I love so much about MyBB is that it's very easy to use and it offers free hosting which one can easily swap to paid hosting anytime one feels like. The information on this article is quite helpful for anyone looking to setup a new forum.



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EfficientNinja
I don't own and I haven't started making a forum. I knew there are frameworks or software to build one but I didn't know it was this fast and easy. I guess the hardest part of making a forum is making it popular and maintaining regular users. Can you make a guide for that next? Create and Grow Your own Forum Using MyBB



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Martinsx1
What you said about the next step after forum set up in advertising and getting more members to join the forum is another difficult task.

Some people don't see social media as a capable tool to achieve this aim while some do see it as useful. One good way to achieve this deal is by advertising the new forum in other well established forums with the use of posters signatures.



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EfficientNinja
I get what you're saying about attracting new members to your forum. Thanks for the added leads.

What I know nothing and I'm wondering about is making them stay or maintaining the regular forum members. How do you keep them interested and not feel bored in your forums?



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Corzhens
Pardon me for saying this but creating a forum is not the hard part and maybe we can say it is actually the easy part. All you need is the software and technical know-how by reading the tutorial. But when it comes to the hard part, the question is how to populate your forum with bona-fide members. It is not easy to invite people. Of course, it is easy to post invitations and even sending it via email but the response will not be encouraging. That’s the experience of most forum owners with their new forum. You need a good strategy for the promotion and also a good business plan.



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