What are the best services for creating a community forum around a product or business?

Old-school forums such as vBulletion, Invsion Power Boards, PhpBB all have a lot of plug-ins and it might be possible to customise what you're after. You could look at newer kids on the block: https://moot.it/ http://xenforo.com/ Both which claim to re-imagine/bring a fresh perspective to forums. If you're looking for a enterprise solution you could look at: http://www.lithium.com/ If you're after a community that goes beyond dealing with support issues (eg. ZenDesk, Salesforce), I think a forum platform will be your best solution by far. Forums are a brilliant repository of user-generated information, so discovering content should be easy - especially if you give it priority on your homepage. As for contributing, their are user hurdles to most platforms. Active community management will be essential to getting users to the platform - and getting them to contribute - and getting them to return! So don't spend all your budget on the technology, because you'll need people to make a community work! Hope this helps :)

You might want to take a look at tried-and-tested communities and social networks. Depending on the size of the community your target group the tools you want to provide to the community members whether you want to build an own community site, integrate a community into your site or just establish a community in any social network and the product/business you to build it around, there is a wide array of other options for building a strong community. Here are some of them: Facebook Pages and Groups can be used as a way to form and organize a community. Attracting users is easy, because you are building the community where most of them go everyday anyway. Quora Depending on the number of users and the release date of your community, Quora can be called one of the most powerful community platforms. The best thing about it: Quora knows best how to organize information, which makes it perfect for support issues. There are few companies that handle the distribution of relevant information better than Quora. Disqus A great white-label solution, which fits you best, if you already have a website with content set up for the product. It's only the start of a community, though: Disqus focuses on organizing comments. You might also want to take a look at Ning, SocialEngine, SourceForge (software specific), BuddyPress (Ning x WordPress) and HiveLive. For hardcore CRM consider Jive (Yammer is no good). The list goes on and on. These are just some examples. If you specify your Question (what kind of product, what tools will the community members need etc.), I can limit the options a bit more.

The problem with old Forum architecture is that it does not revolve around how a typical user might search for something. Quora is much better at that, for example.  Meaning, you search for a particular issue, problem, or insight and you are navigated to the best possible 'source of knowledge' or URL for that.  Kind of like how I got to your questions. That said, much of what you are seeking deals with developing an appropriate process around the product community.  Technology will not solve all of your problems. In fact, the tools are only there to support this process. If you think your community would be best suited in a Quora type framework (Q/A/Posts/Topic etc), then I would suggest you have a look at Kutpoint - http://www.kutpoint.com. We built our product for internal purposes and then rolled it out to a wider audience based on our love for Quora :)

I guess I disagree about vBulletin. Better stated, I don't see why a forum would be all that hard to navigate for new users. If you set it up with a new user in mind, with clear organization and a place to welcome new users there shouldn't be any issues.   And I have to point out that reddit is just a great big forum with a few nifty tools to upvote/downvote topics. So why not own the forum, the data and statistics?

Marc's got some great suggestions, and it really depends on what the folks in your community are doing now. That said, platforms that allow one to get their data out are a plus in my book. If you need to move your community elsewhere, you might be able to convince people to migrate, but if they have to leave their content behind, that's going to be a tough sell. Open source options like BuddyPress may be a bit easier to do.