Buying forums

[Nightfire]

I've never bought a forum, I don't even know how to put a forum on the web XD, but I was thinking about requesting to buy a forum that was once already in use.

Few questions though, how much do forums normally costs that were previously owned? it's now closed but still has a .net domain and is running just to say if anyone's interested in buying it they can contact the admin but other than that it's shut down.

It's a vbulletin forum, has two skins, not sure if that helps but this is all I know XD.

So what would be the avg on buy forums? I can understand that certain sites would be worth more if they had more members and such but atm this has none just shutdown but has skins pre-built.

Would it be better to just buy a completely new forum? the only reason i'm hesitating on that is that I don't know how to code a forum.

Also which would you say is better, IPB or VBulletin? or which serves which purposes better?

[Ben]

If you don't know how to code a forum, don't get one.
You will need to change things on any forum you get.

E.G

You could buy one and learn to code a forum.

Or

you could buy one already 'coded' and then when it comes to changing it you are screwed and it will get hacked/broke XD
It is not as hard as you think, not much coding is required its mainly done by control panel. Only coding is CSS, and thats when you make your own skins

[Henry]

i'm pretty sure ipb and vb are equal, its up to opinion.
i like ipb more, but i've never seen the vb CPs so idk

[Aesahaettr]

The only time I would see buying an already existing forum as a better choice than a new one would be if the domain really mattered to you, or if the members were still there and you planned on keeping the community as is.

In your case though it seems your considering it for the pre-built factor.
I wouldn't suggest you buy your own forums if you don't know that much about the coding and the hosting.

IPB and VBulletin are definitely not your only choices of forums.
There are plenty of other top notch forum hosting/building options.

I don't know what kind of forum you are planning to have, and how serious you are about it. Those come into the spotlight when searching for the right forums.

IPB vs VBulletin, out of those two I would prefer IPB.
Though on a larger scale those wouldn't be my top considerations.

Also if you are considering buying these forums you talk about, I assume you might also consider paying for forums?

Once I know all that I'll gladly throw out some more detailed advice. ^_^

[Tesseract]

No idea about costs of forums...

However, domains aren't expensive, and you barely need to do any coding for most forums, unless you plan on writing your own addins or a skin, the latter of which isn't too hard if you know CSS, the former of which depends on the language your forum uses... There are also thousands of free forums out there (phpBB, although I seem to remember that suffered from thousands of holes, YAF, a quick google'll bring up more...) which aren't difficult to install... Really, unless you particularly want the domain/users, there's no point in buying an old forum.