Forum maintenance?

[Ed Kolis]

I'm doing a research paper for school and I need to determine the feasibility of setting up an Online forum for an organization at my school. So I was wondering if I could be so bold as to ask about how much time per week is spent by Shrapnel employees on the maintenance of this forum? I'd appreciate this because then I could estimate how much time would be required for maintenance of a smaller forum, but I also understand if this is confidential business information that you'd rather not divulge.
Thanks!

[Gandalf Parker]

Depends on what you mean by maintenance. A decent forum software can pretty much run by itself with only rare requests for creating a new forum or adding a moderator. What I would call "maintenance" requests tend to be about 1 or 2 a month.

Now if you mean moderation, thats quite abit different. Moderattion requests tend to be more often but still probably amounts to 1 or 2 a week. Of course Im not sure how many that would be if I werent already on the forum for so much time doing some things preemptively.

Richard and Mindi are spending alot of time on the forums but Im not sure how much of that would be considered maintenance, and how much would be modification of the new forum software.

Adding features such as file upload/attachment will increase maintenance.

[Ed Kolis]

I suppose I meant maintenance and moderation combined, and thanks for your quick answer!

I wonder if you'd also know, are database-based forums easier or harder to maintain than flat-file forums? I'm actually comparing several different packages and one (phpBB) happens to be database-based while the other is UBB.classic, which is of course flat-file.

Oh, by the way, did you mean 1 or 2 requests per month/week, or 1 or 2 hours spent on handling them per month/week?

Thanks again for your help; I really appreciate it!