I’ve been contemplating selling my forum because I believe it’s grown beyond my capabilities. Reading Adrian Wee’s post yesterday, which eventually led to Lee Dodd’s article, reminded me of how I got involved.

I bought a forum from a brilliant Australian kid (he’s still Administrator on the forum) late last year. Soon after, I contacted Lee Dodd on a webmaster forum called SitePoint and asked if he was interested in collaborating. Unfortunately, Dodd was busy with his own forums and was also participating in some speaking gigs.

He told me to write him again in a month’s time. It felt silly to wait and so I learned whatever I could from my moderators and from other established forums, applying what made sense to me. I removed inactive forums, created strict rules and guidelines, appointed a team of moderators, added new forum skins and modules, applied SEO, etc. etc.

It was really tough in the beginning. Moving the forum to a dedicated server in the U.S. was difficult and not to mention expensive at US$260 a month. And to make matters worst, someone attacked our server in February to the point that we couldn’t last even 24 hours without re-booting. We lost a big chunk of members because of the constant cock-ups.

Things started to stabilize in March and little by little, the traffic came back - we were number 1 on search engine results for many keywords. The measures that we’d implemented had a positive effect but not without resistance, as always. Some members didn’t like my strict rules regarding posting and discussing software cracks. And some moderators think I favour others just because I didn’t accept their ideas. I had to remove (i.e. ban or sack) them.

It was painful but it help keep the forum orderly and not lead us into legal issues. Word spread about our forum and we were referenced in articles and publications, sometimes mistaken to be a Microsoft-owned forum.

In less than 12 months, our community grew from under 2,000 members to almost 19,000 members. I also have a strong, albeit diverse, team of moderators and helpers - volunteers from Australia to UK and Canada. On the SEO department, we had 82,000 pages indexed on Google and our traffic came from 78,000 different search phrases last month.

We expect to serve 400,000 unique visitors and 6,000,000 pageviews (not hits) this month!

Next, you’re probably wondering if I’m making loads of money like Lee Dodd. Well, I’ll tell you in my next blog post. ;)

To be continued…