Common Mistake #1
When you start a forum, you probably want it to become an active forum; you want that people can discuss everything about the topic of your forum (or everything when it's a general forum).
So what do you do then: you create a bunch of subforums for everything there is to talk about on your forum's subject.
Big mistake!!
And why is it such a big mistake?
Well... when you start a forum you won't have much activity in the beginning. And when you have so many subforums with 0 or only a couple topics in them, your forum will look completely empty. So visitors will not register on your forums because it seems that there is nothing to do.
Second reason is it'll be easier for you (or other admins) as well.
In the beginning you'll have to create a bunch of topics for other members to reply to.
5 topics in a subforum is not much (even not enough to get things rolling), but it's a start.
But when you have e.g. 25 subforums, and you want to get at least 5 topics in each... Start posting because you'll have a lot of work to do.
The trick is to create new subforums when there is need for a new one.
When you see there are getting some topics about something, then it could be time to create a new subforum for it.
But only when it's relevant to the main topic of your forum.
So when the number of members, topics, and posts grow, you can also start to expand the number of subforums and categories.
Article written by Harro for Forum Affiliates Network
Thanks to Rebelrose from Rebelrosenetworks for the correction.
It is not allowed to redistribute this article. It is however allowed to quote parts from it and provide a link to the full article.
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