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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. |