My Watch Forum

I have just started my own watch forum called My Watch Forum. This is the first time I have tried my hands on running a forum. I am member of several watch forums and I noticed many of them do not employ good forum softwares or tools and it made them look really messy and disorganized.

Getting a domain name was kind of a challenge. A lot of the domain names I want were already taken. My Watch Forum came to me quite easily not because I was thinking of "myspace" because literally it is "my" watch forum. Anyway the domain name was AVAILABLE, which was the reason why I chose it. GoDaddy has great deals on domain names as well as hosting plans. I went with them because I have several websites with them and it is much easier to have them all under one provider.

The most commonly used forum software is from vBulletin. It is a great software with many cool features but it does cost $85/year to lease and $160 to own the license. Since I do not know if this forum will work out, I do not want to put too much money into it. I found this cool website ForumMatrix that allows you to compare various forum softwares - ranging from license to Free and Open Source. I used vBulletin as the base comparison and the closest I found was SimpleMachineForum.

At this point, I got all I needed to start my forum - registered domain name, hosting plan and a forum software.

I will post more about setting up my forum using SMF.