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I have a few blogs and one of them is getting pretty popular so I was thinking of adding a forum to it. As the others get popular, they might also benefit from a forum.
My question is this . . . which is the better way to present the forum? forums.mysite.com - part of my current site, or grab a domain name and make it a stand-alone forum?
I personally don't like forum-only sites, so I'd say add it to your domain as a sub-directory, not a sub-domain. As a sub-directory, you'll probably get more links to your site, and therefore, more PR. A sub-domain would be considered a different domain entirely, so you'd have to do PR for that separately from your main domain.
And just look at what Chris has done here--that should count for something. :D
Yup, I would, usually, add it as part of your main site.
However, there are times with a different domain is okay (like when you have a really good domain) and in those times just make sure you cross link them and treat them like they're the same site, even if they aren't.
I was leaning towards the subdomain route.
Then I picked up a few nice domains where one could be the blog and the second could be the forum.
I guess I'm just trying to figure out where the better branding value would be everything under one brand or in seperate brands.
For example. I wanted to do a blog about domains. So I have thedomaindigest.com. I recently picked up tldtalks.com which I think would make a great forum url.
The other point that comes to mind is signing up. Obviously users would need to register for the forum, so if I decided to require registration to leave comments on the blog then I would hate for users to have two different usernames for "the same site".
Well, I didn't mention this earlier because you didn't ask, but it seems a bit weird to run a blog and a forum on the same site. They're both community-based systems, but different in important ways. I've actually never seen a true blog running with a real forum (WordPress + vBulletin, for example). I've seen stuff like Joomla and SMF, but that's a little bit different.