Message boards and forums can be very beneficial when it comes to advertising for cosmetic surgeons. By including a forum on your website, you allow your visitors and potential patients to connect with others like themselves, while also giving them an opportunity to connect with you. Forums also add an element of interactivity to your website, which is a great way to keep visitors on your site longer and coming back again and again. As a side benefit, active forums create lots of content, which the search engines love.
Unfortunately, if you use a message board on your website, you can encounter security problems. Hackers are actually able to change things on your website using your message board. They may do this in order to hijack your homepage, add frames to your site, and so on. Further, your site may actually need to be taken down if there is a threat of the server crashing.
These security problems most often occur when using popular, and often free, message boards. Hackers are far more likely to go after the most used boards. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t use a message board on your site, but you should take precautions. First, make sure that your entire website and all of its pages are backed up in case any problems do occur. Second, make sure that you regularly update the message board so that you always have the latest version. Newer versions will have newer safety measures against viruses and attacks.