Autonomous Industry

TweetYou need to know which categories to implement and how to change the news or calendar features.

For another perspective what do you wish to talk about and what do you think your community will want to talk about? Go to a few other band forums and see what they have, then keep it clear by limiting your categories to no more than a few.  You can always add new categories whenever you think it’s time.  Include a category for feedback from fans to discover what dedicated categories they would like.  If a category grows too large, it can always be branched out with sub categories too.  Here is how to change a category and the boards within them.

Create New Category, first you have the option to change it’s position on the forums.  Give the category it’s name and make collapsible or not, this gives forum visitors the option to minimize the category.

You will now see that category heading on the next page.  Here you can input a new board or edit ones already there.

The board is where the majority of information goes, you see the boards description and its privileges and who can post there too.  Add your information and click Add Board.

Below the two new parts to the forum are shown.  Cultivate Ideas category and a General Throughts board within that.

Finally if you want to change the news on SMF, go to your Admin panel once more and click on News and Newsletters.  Within the space provided you can put your news.  Instead of news you could also put direct links to other parts of your web presence.  The input form accepts html so if you put in the following code, you can see your links in the News section.  To put on new lines you may have to use <br  /> which means new line.

<a href=”http://yourdomain.com/news”>Subscribe to the BAND for all updates</a> &laquo;

<b>Music:</b> <a href=”http://yourdomain.com/listen”>Listen to OUR BAND</a> &laquo; <b>Download:</b> <a href=”http://yourdomain.com/download”>For Free?</a> &laquo;

<b>Media:</b> <a href=”http://yourdomain.com/media”>Find Lyrics, Watch Vid’s & More</a> &laquo;

The reason for the links is to keep new visitors to your site aware that there are other parts to your brand/site.  If someone lands on your forum first out of all the areas you own, such as your main website and blog, then they will then know you have these other areas and they can at least have the choice in whether they wish to delve deeper.  It’s just good practice to keep things like this in the development of any web presence.  The point here is that you are trying to sell everything, and with there being so many potential fans within the separate demographics.

So you’ve set up the backbone of a community, fan’s are free to register, now what you need to know now is part of the routine.  This will involve backing up the database that holds all the communities information.  This can be as easy as an email to an address you specify which will have a file attached. If your forum goes down somehow, you are able to re-install everything and update with your latest backup file.  Another part of the routine is looking at and analysing the stats the forum gives you, the good thing about forums is that they show you how many people are currently on your website live.  This will all come in the routine.

Another point is the addons that are available. You can run a forum and utilize no addons or plugin but you will be more prone to security issues with bots creating spam and posting it on your forum and hackers.

Take a look around the extensions available for the chosen open source community software and see what may aid you and your forum ideas.