As dumb as this may sound (and it WILL sound dumb), I was always under the impression that running a forum was a lot more simple than it is.
I figured you just bought a domain, paid the server provider, picked a template, chose some colors, checked a few boxes, and viola! you are now running a forum. After reading a little into it I now know I could not have been more wrong (well, I guess I could if I really tried... ).
Thanks for all the work you do.
Essentially this is true, but forums are "dynamic" sites that require both the front end and a back end. Then have to continually upgrade the site, add modifications - quite often by hand (as Buster will testify), maintain a healthy database as it is this that is the forum, so if that goes, then everything goes (as Aelthric will testify), and fix things that regularly break.
You also have to continually battle your host (as Dweez will testify to due to some hilarious senior management threads) as dynamic sites, as opposed to static ones, require a constant low server load and most of the services to be up and running well - hosts tend to want to oversell their servers which cause high loads which then knocks out other services like MySQL etc - and just chasing the techs that run the servers can be a major struggle by itself. Our first host for instance, took about 36 hours just to reply to an outage ticket let alone deal with the problem.
Then you have hackers and spammers that have nothing better to do than to destroy other people's work.