Thanks for all your answers and opinions! I have decided that I will give it a go but not in the near future. First of all I will concentrate on writing content and getting backlinks and once traffic reaches a certain level I will use the forum to transform the site from a website to a portal/community. I totally agree with Zenta who said “once it reaches critical mass you can offload a lot of the work to more senior regular readers by appointing them as moderators …“