My journey to forums

Its was the year 2006 when i was first introduced by a forum, It was the same time when i also come to know about social networking sites, the first site which i joined was friendster.com and from there one of my friend passed me the link of myspace.com, soon that attracts me so much that social networking became part of my life, while being active on social networking site i came in contact with a friend who was into forums and asked me to moderate his new forum, i was totally unknown to this word "forum" still i checked the link and saw a board with a long list of categories and topics, anyhow i register in it and tried looking out what exactly it is, after some lurking i logged out and never came back :)
After a month while searching on one resource i got a link of one forum and when i saw it, it was a damn busy forum with lots of activities and knowledgeable contents, Thanks to my bookmarks link where i saved that forum URL which my friend gave me, i came back again to that forum and saw in bottom it was written "hosted for free by invisionfree" "powered by invision power board". I clicked the link of invisionfree, it was the start of my Administration to forums i understood that its a forum software and anyone can make his/her forum for free and i made one forum for my friends, i want to tell you that i never learned HTML, javascript or any website designing or dev related softwares or subjects, it was just a passion for forum made me do many things by my own.
After creating a community i saw people's response which was surprisingly great! my friends, family and people around me were so much encouraging to me and the result was a active community of mine through invisionfree, i give credits to invisionfree to teach me a lot about forums and HTML, the support was great and the invisionfree community was so friendly as well.
On the professional point i was still unaware that how someone can earn through forums and what is SEO, adsense, pagerank etc.till i come to know that other than invisionfree there are many more softwares for forum building and my research and studies for forums became more deeper day by day and i decided to start a web business, that time i was on full time job of marketing in an import-export firm in Mumbai, India. It took more than a year to make up my mind and i left my full time job and turned my mind into forum administrating.
My first community was bohrachat.com which is no more as it was on invisionfree and some personal problem i switched it off, my next move was to decide between IPB(Invision power board) and Vbulletin softwares and it took 1 months of research and comparison between two i decided to purchase vbulletin as it is the easiest and one of the most popular forum software available, i started giving my time to community forums of vbulletin and related forums where i can learn more about this software and ways to make community from more professional and technical points, i am still a learner and i mostly learned from my own failures and mistakes i made in several attempts of making forums, theadminzone, adminfusion and geekpoint are some great sites which are still helping me a lot on forum building and development, the other sites which i really like to recommend is Lee dodd's earnersforum.
Forums are the only the best way to get resource, either education, business, articles and discussion on any subject or issues and to make a great forum the one best point is get active to other forums by writing and reading and giving useful resource, i should not forget to write here that you should be passionate about forums to be a successful forum administrator.