AWS

Yes it was.

Ham radio and shooting pool. And the biggest is running forums.

I used to actively participate in SEO forums. Things have changed so much now I'm not 100% sure you need to do anything to make it easier for SE's to find you. I do add a signature on the forums I visit. Some of them don't allow sigs. Some allow sigs but no links. I drop the link on Twitter every once in a while. I used to be heavy into Twitter. I would watch the members online go up like crazy after I posted a link to an article. I was obsessed with trying to convert those visitors to users. Never could and never could understand why they didn't join. You would think if you had over a thousand online reading the article that someone would want to say somehting about it. Never happened.

When I built my first website I coded it by hand. No fancy HTML editors. Good old Notepad. Since I had started to code a dynamic site in ASP so users could comment on the articles I heard Micrsoft had a server extension to make things easier. They were called Frontpage extensions. There was an extension to create a guestbook. I hacked it to turn it into a forum. Threaded replys all using the guestbook extension. Later I found wwwthreads. It was written in perl so I had to familiarize myself with it. I installed it and hacked up an import script to import the posts. The site had close to 100,000 posts at the time. Soon after I found UBB. I installed it and again hacked up an import script to import the posts. This time the site had almost a million posts. The import script was used as a base to import from other software packages later on. I had built it modular so it was easy to add a module for other software. In any case to answer. I did it once. It was a lot of work and I would not want to do it again. You have to ask yourself why you would not invent the wheel when it's already there for you.

I posted this on my blog so I thought I'd also post it here:

I remember that site.

There is a definite need for forum mentors. People that will guide a new user along. Most people that join a community either don't post because they are intimidated or because they are shy. If there were mentor who's job it was to message the new user and get them involved communities would thrive.

I'm a big beleiver in tags. I add them to every thread I start. I've got much traffic from them.

They caught a lot of grief from vbulletin users at the start. Everyone said they stole the vbulletin code. John Percival the fater of vbulletin dispelled that rumor. Problem was he waited to do it until he coukld audit the code. He was in the process of developing 2.0. mybb survived and that's a good thing. They have never wavered from what they do.

If a feature is disabled there is no strain extra strain on the server. Files are there, but, you could remove them. In IPB there is an option when you disable the module to remove it. I think vbulletin is the same. They don't load. I was always in favor of everything included with no addons. It works seemlessy and built by the main devs.

Very good tips.

As you can see from the site stats we have just over 1000 posts. We have over 29,000 members. How did that happen? I originally put this site online after I sold Admin Addict in 2010. It got a good start. Unfortunatley wheile getting my yearly checkup the doc found a tumor in my bladder. It turned out to be benigh so I dodged a bullet. Because this happened I decided websites had to go on the backburner while I tened better to my health. Drinking a partying had to go. I lost the original domain right before I cut my online presence down. It sat as a subdomain on Admin Addict and then Admin Zone. After this thread https://anotheradminforum.com/threads/entering-a-saturated-forum-niche.98/ I found that this site was still online and decided to open it. So to answer the question as to how we have 29,000+ members. The site was online and forgotten about for 14 years. Registration has always been on with no email validation so the spammers registered like crazy. When I upgraded it and went into the admin there was almost 50,000 spam posts in the spam queue. So you see Google will find your site even if it is unmaintained.

Nice re-introdution.

It has pretty much everything. In fact the other forum makers should take a look at what they did in the last couple years.

Lets all welcome https://www.forum-forum.com/members/shawn.10/ to the team. He is our first super moderator. Welcome Shawn.

.info has a bad rep for being spammers paridise. Most SE won't even list them. They have cleaned up there act. They used to be free so spammers took full advantage. I think they now cost money. damage was done. The other new top level domains learned their lesson from watching what happened to .info domains. Most of them are very cheap, but, very cheap is still too much for spammers and scammers.

LOL. Technology is great unless you don't know how to use it.

Yes it's still downloadable. New license is like $499 with $199 renewal. I am a legacy customer so I still get access to new versions and pay old renewal prices. I got a message in the client area to upgrade my licenses to the new classic license at a lower cost of $199 with renewals at $99 every 6 months. I declined and paid $25 to upgrade the license on the test site.

Yes they did. I had my visual basic forum on it before I converted it to vbulletin. The users actauuly liked it better than vbulletin.

Yep it is different. Style editor was way better then I remember in 5.0.

I have installed IPB on a test site. At one time I had all my sites on IPB. I left vBulletin during the version 4 debacle and imported the sites to IPB. After a few years I decided to switch to xenforo. I haven't looked at IPB in a few years. I got an email about IPB 5 demo and looked at it. I went into the client area and renewed one of my old licenses. Site can be found at: http://forumadmins.org I will open it to guest posting once I figure out the permission system again. It's been a while.

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I played around with a demo yesterday. Sure is different from what I remember.

A few years ago there was a proposal to Icann to create .forum top level domains. It took forever and now they are available. I have a 3 of them: https://computerhelp.forum https://freepchelp.forum https://offtopic.forum I was sceptical at first and bought those 3 because I lost the domains the sites were on when I was ill. They were cheap, $4.95 each so I thought why not. Those domains have been online now for almost 6 months. I will say this Google loves the .forum domains. Those sites get almost double the traffic that old sites on .com domains got. If those visitors would only convert to active users. I can dream. What you think about the .forum doamins and all the other lesser known top level domains? Oh, I also have a .online and .tech site, but, that's for another thread.

Haven't really looked at burning board since 3.0 was released. It looked promising then.