Every time I’ve had a question I just go to the vbulletin forums and get my answer or consult the manual. I’ve never had any problems and most of my questions have been featured related instead of a problem. I would imagine forum support is all they offer as well. I’ve never really checked to see if they have phone support.

I’m kinda burnt out on them just because there hasn’t been any effortless returning visitors. Not any on a consistent basis.

I have been wondering about Vbulletin. Do they have good tech support where you can actually get on the phone with them and they will walk you through the issues?

I get so frustrated with Simple Machines because the only support is in the Forum and I am not an HTML master yet. So, I am totally confused when they respond with short comments about altering the code.

Remember that your forum will likely have a ton of different topics and questions that are not on your blog, so it doesn’t necessarily have to compete with your blog’s content if you promote it effectively. At the footer of all your posts, for example, you could have a link that says something like “Have a question about dogs that’s not answered here? Join our forum.” This still leaves it open for comments on your current post but reminds people they can go to your forum for additional questions.

And then once your forum is up and running you can cross-promote the two sites. That’s what I do and it works fine. I have links to my most recent blog posts in my sig file on my forum to keep people coming back to my blog. So a forum and a blog can work very well together and compliment each other.

Thanks for the great commentary. I am 99% sure that I want a forum on my website, but my main concern is how to integrate the forum with blog post comments…will site visitors know when to post comments versus when to visit the forums for a more in-depth discussion?

WB is hosted on my own reseller store websitepalace.com (I gave myself a nice discount. LOL)

Thanks for the compliment on the layout.

This is a very interesting post as I’ve been recently looking into the idea of integrating a forum into my (future) site. I agree that one must already have a regular, decent-sized amount of traffic for it to take off though.

I was also just wondering do you host WB on a regular shared account with HostGator or somebody else or is it on a dedicated server? Or is it hosted on the same plan as your main website?

Many thanks, (and, by the way, I love the new 2createawebsite layout!)

~~SB16

I totally agree with you and there are so many people that beleive that as soon as you setup a forum that members will flood in

I have tried and failed at a couple of forums and learned this the hard way.

Great Post
Daniel_J