Common mistakes new forum owners make?

I will list the 2 most common ones:
- Making too many sections, nobody likes a forum that has thousands of sections.. its also hard to fill up with posts
- Promoting before the forum is complete. One mistake I see new forum owners making is promoting or advertising their forum before its complete.. for example they have nothing setup, or a few forums made, or the forums are empty.. The first thing I do when creating a new forum is try to fill up all my forums with at least one post so the forums dont look empty..

What are some common mistakes you see new forum owners making?

 

You put some two very good points.

I would also like to add: One thing some do is spamvertise, and that actually discourages people from joining.

 

The most common mistakes I tend to see is opening the forum as a "BETA" as you've said Kaiser, or not having any content already posted

 

Yea, its sad.. its not that hard to fill it up.. I saw one forum where it just had the default first forum and was doing post exchanges lol

 

what on earth...

 

Yea it was back in the ForumAdvertiser days.. it had that default First phpBB section. And he was doing exchanges lol.

 

why on earth would someone want to do that?

 

Dont know he was probably just starting out, lol when I first started I wasn't that bad lol

 

ok, fair enough then, I never bothered with exchanges much, as they are not a 100% fix for an active community...

Another mistake new owners may make, is using the default style, or an overused style, and not get a logo added

 

A good example for a overused phpBB style would be Absolution, yea using over used styles is not the best way to go. Your forum wont stand out.

 

that is why I pick less popular styles and tweak them for the community like Chatting Time & Forums4Airports

 

A common mistake I see is forum owners do is worry about the design and all the fancy features other then worrying about getting members and content going.

 

That is another very good point.

 

That's a great point. So is also opening a forum before everything is done.I really don't like this at all.

 

I would say portal. If you are going to own a portal make sure there is lots of space and it's not cluttered. I've learnt from my mistakes.

 

I have never been a fan of portals, thats just me though. Im sure many like me just skip right to the forum.

 

My biggest mistake with my first forum (which I started when I was like fifteen and immature, lol) was immediately adding moderators to the site because they asked to be staff members. The issue there was that one was my brother and another was my friend from school...the brother got obnoxious and power-trippy, while the school friend ended up being the biggest rule-breaker of any other member, haha. Wait until your site gets moving and actually needs more staff other than you to consider adding members to the team, and do it based on their site activities, not your friendship with them. If you're doing just fine moderating the forum alone, there's no need to add anyone else.

 

Good advice im sure it will come in handy to people new to making forums.

 

Leaving it empty is a big one, usually should try to have 10 posts or so in each section before you post, apart from obvious ones where this would be impossible (intros, market, etc).

 

Agreed, and for the ones like market and intros.. I usually fill them up with a guidelines post, or a "Where did you find us" In the case of intros.