Software Conferences

Software Store

Forum Software
Forums are a great tool for software developers to communicate with customers and potential customers. Installation and maintenance are generally easy, and in the long term forums can help reduce technical support.

Choose a Forum
There are a number of free and fee based web forum applications.

Free Solutions:

phpBB
phpBB is one of the most widely used open source forum solutions. The code is active and updates are frequent. There are a number of 3rd party forum modifications available for phpBB including options for adding RSS feeds and spam filtering.
phpBB - http://www.phpbb.com

Extreme Message Board - XMBForum
Web based message board sponsored by iEntry.
XMBForum - http://www.xmbforum.com/

Paid Option:

vBulletin
vBulletin is a powerful, scalable and fully customizable forum package for your web site. vBulletin uses PHP and relies on a MySQL database backend.
vBulletin - http://www.vbulletin.com

Personalized Forum
There are a number of custom forum templates you can use to modify the look of your forum. This will allow you to modify the forum's look and feel to match your websites theme.

Forum Hacks:
phpBB hacks - http://www.phpbbhacks.com/

Forum Spam Prevention
Regardless of what forum you opt for you will likely want to either approve members prior to granting them access or you will want to use captcha codes for each registration or forum post to ensure that the posts are a real person and not a bot.

Many forums have modifications that require users to enter a captcha code. The captcha code will help minimize spam.

Setup
Use keywords and descriptive titles in the forum sections. Depending how closely related products are, it might be appropriate for each software application in a product line to have a separate category or a separate forum altogether. This is a personal decision and one best left up to software developers. Most forums have announce categories so that software developers can announce new releases.

RSS
Many forums have the option of users receiving forum posts via RSS. This is usually an easy modification and it will significantly increase the forum's popularity.

Populate Forum
It is not uncommon for developers to initially populate or "seed" the forum with commonly asked questions related to the their software commonly asked questions.

Security
Stay current on forum patches to prevent security holes.

Related Articles:
How to Reduce Technical Support
How to Charge for Support
How to Reproduce Support Problems