Adding forums to my Wordpres.com blog?

[Personal Bloggers Unite]

As you can see from my website, it is going to be very community based, once I get some more members, which I am doing through forums like yours.

But, I want a community to talk about personal blogging, since I have found none yet.

So, I was wondering - should I add an embedable forum to my blog, which only allows for limited amount of categories and very low profile creation, or should I create an external blog (via Forumotion or something of the sort) and create a page linking to it?

DO NOTE: I can not pay any money for this blog, as of yet.
I need it to become more famous, where I will ask for donations to upgrade to a Wordpress.org kind of blog and such.

So, what do you think?

[Bloggeries]

Forums take a lot of work and even more work to "get going".

That said, lots of great forums out there and everyone had to start somewhere...

[Alexis Wilke]

Yeah, I tried several forums and they all went bust... It's difficult to get enough traction with enough visitors and fresh eyes all the time to keep it going. Now if that's that you want to do... why not!

If the forum is a very important part of your system, then I'd suggest you get a separate version, indeed. phpBB is free...

[ChickenFreak]

Originally Posted by Personal Bloggers Unite

But, I want a community to talk about personal blogging, since I have found none yet.

For what it's worth, the Real Bloggers United forum on BlogCatalog is for personal/nonprofit bloggers. It hasn't hit critical mass yet (that is, there aren't a lot of posts each day), but it's coming along, so you might be better off going over there and participating, than trying to start from scratch.

[Jaded]

I would definitely use phpBB. It's very difficult to start successful blogs and keep them going, so I recommend starting small scale with a small number of boards etc. Important to make the forum visually appealing, of course, and try and make the look fit in with your main blog theme.

[AlanGNW]

I run a fair sized forum SMF and as has been suggested phpbb is good.

There's a few WordPress plugins but they aren't as good as the big players.