DiscussMormonism.com

No, I'm not kidding and no, I'm not thinking about opening a competing message board to this one.

How do you start a message board?

How do you make sure that when someone searches the internet that it appears near the first set of search results?

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=free+message+board

Looks like proboards.com will let you create a message board:
http://www.proboards.com/index.html


You might also be able to start a discussion group on MSN or Yahoo. You can also start discussion boards at Myspace.com, but don't ask me how. I just know that they'll let you do it.

As for making it come up first, I really don't know. In the case of Google, I think you'll need a lot of sites to link to yours, so that would mean getting friends, etc to spread the word.