Ask HN: Do you own or run a forum in a niche market?

1. I run a Discord server for people immigrating to Portugal.

2. Transparency in moderation is key. I have as few rules as possible and keep them as unambiguous as I can. This scales fine (I have moderated larger communities before). For my current community, I have a channel where I discuss the circumstances around each ban or muting. This is really only possible because of the size of the server—if it becomes too difficult to continue doing so, I will cease, but I will make sure to inform everyone in the server so they are aware.

3. I have not monetized the community at this time. When it gets larger I plan on forming relationships with vendors (such as language teachers, immigration lawyers, or rental companies) allowing them to run paid server events or sell services while paying me a % of earnings.

I once had a forum on the back of a digital product (plans to build something.) It was really cool as people would post build logs, community helped everyone, lots of pics, etc. It was fun. And the business was/is a side hustle where I spend about 2 hours a month but make enough to send my kid to college.

But some trolls and people who REALLY cared about non-important parts of the product (to me) started posting a LOT. So I killed it off over needing to maintain it and deal with the 1/100 rude person. Just too much work and stress. The real value was maybe SEO at the time, but since Google sank all forums, probably doesn't matter that much.

So I'm curious to see the answers here!

Yeah, I run Wario Forums as a community for a very specific and somewhat underrated video game series (https://warioforums.com). To answer the questions:

1. I use XenForo. After vBulletin went down the tubes, I discovered XenForo as a replacement, and have found no reason to switch to anything else.

2. Generally, the moderation isn't too much of an issue, since I have a fair few anti spam measures set up on the registration form, including questions specific to the forum topic, plus a dedicated team of moderators and a niche subject matter. The odd troublemaker that gets in will get banned quickly enough anyway.

Maintenance is a little tougher, but the software doesn't get that many updates all things considered, and they've been painless so far.

3. You see, for me monetisation isn't really a priority, so I just have a few ads and a paid membership system, and leave it at that. The site exists because I think it needs to, not because I see it ever becoming a business or self sustaining.

But if you do want to monetise, then it depends how big you expect it to be. Ads pay terribly, especially for community sites (probably because places like Facebook/Twitter/Reddit/etc offer a better deal there), so you're probably going to want a mix of donations and sponsorships if you want to keep the lights on. The former alone is good enough for a small forum or one with a very loyal community, the latter is probably a necessity if you end up needing dedicated servers or cloud services like AWS to keep it online.

Yes, I run https://rangerovers.pub which I started because the mods on the US-based Range Rover forum were overbearing and obnoxious. I was having a conversation with someone I knew from the US forum in a pub in Glasgow, and the fateful question was asked - "How Hard Can It Be...?"

Not that hard, as it turns out.

I use FlaskBB, which I picked because it uses Python and looks modernish, and appeared to be quite resistant to the usual forum exploits. I could go into painful detail about the exact stack but let's just say uwsgi, Postgres, and nginx behind Traefik for SSL termination.

I have a few well-known and trusted users who are mods, and it seems reasonably spam-free. Every so often I go through the database and remove "obvious spammers". It's been largely maintenance-free, beyond keeping exploitable libraries patched.

I did run Google Ads for not-logged-in users for a bit, but it was a pain in the arse and made a whopping 40 quid a year so I stopped. It costs very little to run anyway.

Edit: I haven't seen the number of "Guests online" that high before. Thanks for your assistance with load-testing!