[dickler]

It's pretty simple to sart off with php/mysql. Paul Graham does a lot of data mining on it for moderation (he made applying naive bayes to spam filtering famous a while back).

If you don't have programming skills you're better of off just starting a subreddit. The hard part in these is building the community.

A better strategy might be to find a subreddit with a community and try to take over it somehow (communicate with mods or pay them to take over).

[krapp]

Could easily be done with a framework of course - probably something lightweight. I've got competing implementations in Laravel 4 and Slim Framework being worked on right now. I know someone else is working on a HN news clone in Laravel as well, it was mentioned in a thread somewhere.

But yeah definitely, getting people to join would be the hard part. I've seen people build what they thought were the greatest forums ever and just sort of expect people to show up but they don't.