Make a Bulletin Board

How do you get a bulletin board on your site? There are a number of options. For instance, FreeBB offers free bulletin board hosting in exchange for your allowing their ads on it. PHPBB offers the same service ad-free on your own site if you're tech savvy enough to install it on your own server. Wordpress.com will host your blog, which can double as a community site in that it allows visitors to comment on your posts and contribute articles. Download Wordpress.org (also called Cafelog or B2) if you want to install it yourself. PHPNuke is a content management system (CMS) which offers blog-style article posting, surveys, and other community-building features. The immensely popular "news for nerds" site Slashdot is an example of a CMS in action.

By the way, if you're looking for a website host for a good price, I highly recommend Startlogic. I have sites hosted with them and am impressed with the offerings they have, including simple activation of B2, PHPNuke, PHPBB, and much more at very reasonable rates.

As you can see, there are many ways to form a community on your site without having to program a discussion board or similar system from scratch. It'll take some time to get to the point that the site grows and steadily increases in popularity on its own, but in the end your work will be well worth it.