[dougmwpsu]

I’m a student at Penn state university, and I’m thinking it would be cool to set up a message board devoted to discussion pertaining to the school. Sports, classes, partying, news, ect. Does anyone know of any other schools with message boards for that particular school? Can anyone tell me some of the inns and outs of running a message board? I was thinking I could start a student organization devoted to maintaining and moderating the board and that any money made from advertising could go directly back into the club coffers.

 

[Jam_Master_J]

My school recently started one at www.nsac.ns.ca/forums
Seems like a good idea, ours hasn't really taken off yet but it's getting a few posts.

 

[discord]

My old high school once had a message board. Oh the drama!

 

[princeclassic]

hi, another penn state student here. there's a message board over at http://psu.dailyjolt.com/ but it's pretty poor. best of luck!

 

[erikzen]

I started one for a student organization that I was a founder of. It's a graduate business student association. The main problem I had was getting it to take off. You need to have a core of dedicated members who are going to generate discussion. That's the main issue that I had.

The funny thing is that before I started a dedicated message board, we had a group at MSN groups. We had about 80 people signed up and it was fairly active. But for some reason, when we moved to our own site everything just stopped.

What software were you thinking of? I've been active at a few forums and always found the vBulletin software to be the best, in terms of the user experience. I first tried to use phpBB. I launched it but about 3 days later it crashed, and since it's free it was very difficult getting support. I gave up on that and bit the bullet and paid for the vBulletin software. Unfortunately, nobody's using it.

I suppose that once it gets going your biggest challenge is going to be moderating it. If it's really active you're going to need some help.

Watch out for legal issues too. Post disclaimers that things said do not reflect the opinions of the school or the moderators of the boards. At my school they were very leary of me starting the board in the first place and I actually had to have a seperate site from my organization's site because they were afraid of lawsuits.

 

[dougmwpsu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by princeclassic hi, another penn state student here. there's a message board over at http://psu.dailyjolt.com/ but it's pretty poor. best of luck!

yeah daily jolt's is really pisspoor, it's unmoderated, part of another site, and not broken into catagories. not to mention that noone checks it. here's a few other psu forums that i found, but they deal pretty much exclusivly with sports.
http://mb8.scout.com/bpennstate
http://bwi.rivals.com/forum.asp
what would really be key is if facebook got up off their lazy buts and put a forum on their site, but oh well.

also, that was the idea of having a club to run the thing, there's your user base to create conversation and then you also have your moderators and advertisers. anyone have suggestions for where to host it?