I have created the forum yesterday and it is now live at ghacks forum or by following the forum link in the top nav of the blog. The next days, and probably weeks, will be used to test the forum, make modifications, add new plugins and optimize the forums and practically anything that has to do with it.

I invite you to join the forum and start posting if you like. I can guarantee that the usernames and posts will remain on the forum regardless of the optimization and changes.

The forum comes with a full CMS as well and my initial idea is to offer blogs to members that I trust (e.g. moderators or supermoderators but also regular users) and who “have something interesting to say”. Thinking about revenue sharing options for the forums and blogs as well.

If you have the time look at the forum and let me know, either here or in the forum, what you would change, what you would like to see and what should remain as is. Vbulletin veterans are especially invited to share their must have plugins and modifications.

Hope to see you soon in the forum.

Let me first explain why I have decided to use the bbpress forum software. The main reason is that it was developed by the same guys who also created the blog software that I’m using and that it integrates well with that software. This means that you have to register once at the forum and may use the login for the forum on ghacks as well. This has the big advantage that your comments on ghacks are less likely to be declared as spam by the automatic spam checking scripts.

I consider the forum a beta forum, the categories are not complete and there is surely enough room for improvement. The Forum Discussion board was specifically created for this purpose. This is the place to discuss the forum itself, the boards, the posts, the usability. Everything you can think of.

All other boards should be rather self explanatory, if you have questions about them ask them in the forum discussion board as well. I tried to keep the rules as simple as possible. We all know that there have to be some rules to protect me and my site from harm. There are actually only two rules for now, those are:

1. Behave (includes no flaming, no offensive text, no spaming)
2. The following topics / links are not allowed: Warez, Porn, Scams, everything else that is illegal. This includes links to such content and requests.

Last but not least I hope that I see some action on the forums on a daily basis pretty soon. I consider this a great opportunity to discuss matters that can’t be discussed at ghacks directly. (because discussion here is limited to the articles that I post).

So, if you want to know my favorite football team you have to head over to the forums :)