Running a forum & What NOT to do!
 

There are a lot of things you should not do. But here's a big one: DO NOT START A FORUM AND THEN ABANDON IT!

Look at this awful forum: http://www.nuhit.com/forums

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You eventually lose whatever member base you had, and it becomes a free spam haven. Eventually, Google will punish you for having crap, and your site gets unindexed by the search engines.

Worse yet, if this is a business, your company looks like a joke.

Look at what was on the homepage:

That was left by a moderator, somebody with limited admin access, because the owner/admin vanished.

Unless this person is dead (and he's not, from what I read on vBulletin), there's no excuse for leaving up such an awful site. You can't even use it for your resume or portfolio --- in this example, the programmer/developer would look like an idiot for letting his project fall to shambles. Who would hire him?

Simply pathetic. :rolleyes:

wow spam run wild...

What nobody can understand is how that particular site stays up --- somebody has to be paying the bills for the server/hosting. You can't run vBulletin on a free hosting account (not for long, at least) -- the CPU/RAM requirements quickly grow beyond limited resource accounts.

This is true maybe one of those sites lost interest in and has others...

I found another one tonight. This is pathetic.

Recently there have been a lot of 404's here on this site, bad incoming links. The problem is people writing the URL in a sentence, at the end of the sentence. The period is considered part of the URL by the stupid auto-linking in their software or CMS. (You'll notice I almost NEVER put a URL at the end of a sentence, for this very reason.)

Anyway, I was looking up the word "period" on the mod_rewrite forum. This is what I got for results:

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... that's not the kind of "period" I'm interest in researching.

I used to use the ModRewrite forums quite a bit back in 2008, when I was learning htaccess and mod_rewrite more in depth.

It has been abandoned for almost a month now, with more than 15,000 new spam threads in the one forum you're able to make new posts in. Many more threads have replies (including the older tech threads), often with hardcore porn images.

The last reply to one thread I was looking at had a very graphic BJ photo in it. :rolleyes:

If you're going to go on vacation for a month, take a laptop, close the forum, or least somebody else in charge. Unless the admin is dead, there's no excuse for this.

Not to mention phpBB is one of the most spammed forum codebases around. Using phpBB requires either a very active admin/mod presence, or a deep love of spam. Use SMF, vBulletin ... pretty much anything else, to be honest.

So much for that site. Bookmark removed. :(

Googling for another site now.