I thought I would make a quick post about the benefits of attaching a forum to your site. Now this most likely applies to large ecommerce sites however it is still worth noting as forums can prove to be very effective in search engine optimisation (SEO).
Have a think about a consumers or even your own search behaviour. Very seldom when we are after a certain product do we search for it in a search engine, go through to a site and then buy it (okay this sometimes does happen especially with sites like Amazon). What I tend to do is research into products I am after and more often than not this research takes me to communities within the World Wide Web. Now this is one half of why having a forum for your site is a good idea.