Hello, I have a couple forums and I am about to venture into a new area. The forums I am currently running are private and hidden from public view. However, on one of my boards we want to open a section to the public for American V-twin tech advice. I am going to install it on a subdomain of the main site. On this new public board, I want to have ads (which I currently do not have on my other boards,) and encourage new users to purchase a premium membership to be ad-free. I'm looking to do something similar to this site here.

I am currently using phpbb3 on my other boards. I have no idea how to place ads, (or is it more rightly called "selling ad space"?) how to get sponsors, or even if this can be done in phpbb3. The site that I linked to above uses vBulletin, so I am wondering if I will have to use this or something similar as well. If so, I DEFINITELY want to know what I'm doing before I spend $180 for an owner's license.

I know absolutely nothing about this, so all help is appreciated.

So, to clarify, my questions are these:

1. How do you place ads in a forum? Is it just code that has to be inserted somewhere?
2. Can this be done in phpbb3 or should I use vBulletin?

Well there are different kinds of ads but there will always be some kind of code you need to place in your template depending where you want your ads to go. If you are using ads like Google Adsense it will generate code for you to place on your site, or if you sell private advertising (banners) you just put html code.

As for your second question, yes ads can be placed on any forum, but whether to use phpbb or vB is a whole other debate.

__________________
World of Warcraft Forums - Your #1 place to discuss all things World of Warcraft.

We just do them ourselves and place the add into the html. This gives us a lot more control over the advertisers and such. Start with google adwords...

__________________
It's not my fault...

As said, it depends upon how you want to control the adverts and where you want to place them. Most modifications cover the usual places for adverts and so you would just have to install them to place adverts; however, you may want to place adverts in other areas. For this, you would have to edit the code yourself.

As for the software issue, phpBB3 is fully able to support adverts. ANY software is able to support them and I wouldn't worry about switching to vBulletin, unless your community demands such a change.