How (or why) did you start your first forum?

We're a community of forum admins/owners right? So how (or why, even) did you get your first forum , or community started?

My first shot was with phpnuke 8 or 9 years back, integrating a MUD (online text based game) with a web side interface. It was easy to use and manipulate, and a great place to start. That project was discontinued due to lack of interest a few years ago, but it is where I started the whole community/forum thing.

 

Moved to "General Community Discussion".

 

My first forum was the the Invisionfree predecessor to the forum I am currently managing. I set it up simply because I thought I could do better than the clans and forums that already existed in similar topic areas, and because... well, every fan sites needs a forum in my opinion.

(Boring reasoning, I know).

 

I set up my first forum because there was nothing available for the group of patients it served.

 

I was a member of my competitors' sites and got tired of some things like bad additudes from moderators/admins, flame wars, and mysteriously disappearing threads and posts. I told my self I could do it better. I still put up with it for another year then I finaly did it and haven't looked back.

 

When I was 15, I made a forum on a free host like proboards or something like that. It was a gothic type forum. I am not anywhere near gothic now LOL I listen to country music :p

 

Ok looking at this I am somewhat a late bloomer with my forums haha - my first one was opened on January 01 2009 - it is an Australian Sport forum I had planned it for 18 months at least after I grew up as a sports mad person playing everything i could however a number of serious injuries resulted in me unable to play sport and further and as a result was told by doctors not to play sport and I set up my forum as I wanted to stay in the sporting world/circle so to speak.

Unfortunately some of my competitiors didn't like me opening and I was hacked twice where they deleted everything (it was an Australian IP address that hacked me) after my latest hacking many of my forum members didn't come back as it was the second time so I am currently re-developing the forums (while they are still open) and hopeful for a v2.0 version release in the coming weeks.

 

Haha, typing this through a phone will be a tough one.

My first forum that I built was Setsou. Although there was another admin, I pretty much installed the forum and made the skin.
This was around March 2009, but I learn rather quickly. It is still on a MyBB, Same as my Anime forum.

 

Wow, it's a pity your forum got hacked. Did you report them to anyone, maybe get them shut down for it? Best of luck when it reopens.

Back to the topic, there are some nice stories here.

 

The forum is still up - i reopened with a basic theme but behind the scenes am working on a new theme/skin I was looking at getting a custom one made but won't do it yet - but will re-launch properly with a bang in a couple weeks just working on all of the images etc at the moment.

After reading through the stories so far there are some good stories behind some great websites.

 

I set mine up because there were no UK based forums in my topic area - I thought "how hard can it be?"

 

Yeah, that usually indicates a lot of work ahead of you.
I, myself put countless hours of work into my first community, only to shut it down due to lack of interest a few years later, but I wouldn't trade the experience for anything.

 

EXACTLY!!

i got sooo tired of only one board being avail for our niche. admins and supermods were douches and i couldnt take it anymore...

 

I opened my forum because i had had enough of being looked down upon coz i was a young parent, so i made a forum for young parents, but have changed it to a fun parenting forum so that its not age discriminate, and facing the facts, im not going to be young forever, so this way its targeting young parents, but is also a fun place for all parents of all ages if that all makes sense?

 

I opened mine because I was on another forums, and I was banned for giving the admin suggestions, so now, with the suggestions that I gave him, I opened my site. (He has been up for a year, I have been up for 4 months and we have about the same members and posts)