Plenty of open source or cheap forum software out there as well as host-it-for-fee providers.

For a low-volume, closed community forum, I’d think you could avoid most of the hassle of runnng a forum, which is dealing with trolls and other types of assholes.

I’d look at phpBB (free) and vBulletin (paid) in addition to SMF (free) and see if any one seems to meet your needs better. All are fine; some have different features and hosting complexity/cost.

My friend is cancer researcher who would like to start a forum for academics to help them with career planning and execution, particularly in navigating to the private sector.  Can anyone tell me in specific terms how much time it takes to start a forum and to run it once up?  At some point, she could probably loop in some forum ambassadors, similar to MMM.  If you are pretty adept in this area and keen to help, she'd probably pay you for some quick and easy consulting.  Thanks!

Question you did not get answered is how much time.  Having set up several for hobbies, work or other things, with some of the software mentioned it can be done in a matter of minutes once you have a web site hoster who can handle whatever platform you want to use.  You just need to make sure you buy a site that allows you to run PHP to use phpBB for example and not one that is just .NET.  The most common hosters like GoDaddy and Blue Host and others can easily walk you through it even with no tech skills.

Like others said, technical side is not all that hard. And not particularly time consuming.

The administrative and promotional sides take much longer. Especially in the beginning when you are trying to promote the forum and create a sense of community. I spent a lot of time on that. Fairly quickly, we were able to recruit moderators whose primary function in the beginning was to generate and maintain conversations. Eventually conversations flow naturally and smoothly but in the beginning, it takes dedicated effort. I also spent a lot of time spreading the word and promoting it.

Then when we got bigger, our time was spent dealing with drama. And of course, the higher expenses of extra bandwidth. Which meant part of my time was spent selling advertising space to pay for all that.

I eventually sold the whole thing and the new owner wasn’t a forum person (she focused on the events side) and it died slowly over a few years and they switched to a small facebook group. So it does take someone willing to put in the time, effort and energy to keep things going.


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