In the early days of the internet there was a service started called Usenet, it’s a lot like a distributed forum.

Usenet is still in use today, although a lot of people do not know about it. A number of the forum systems out there have plugins that enable you to import Usenet posts into your forum.

I’m helping a Kiwi (2 actually) get started in the online working world. One of their sites is a forum. This forum is just starting out and is facing the standard problem of a forum, chicken and egg.

People won’t join/post unless there is a reason for them to do so. The reason can be as simple as it appears to be a good community with interesting things going on, but how do you do that with a new forum?

Some of you will be in the same situation as me and run servers instead of having an account on a web hosting site.

I currently have 2 servers located in a datacenter in America and then a couple of backup servers in my garage that take regular snapshots of my production servers. The also act as backup MX (mail exchanger) and DNS servers so that I can quickly and easily move my hosting should something fail in the datacenter.