Shawn

A great tip for your newer forum admins. Deal with forum drama quickly and privately if you can! Forum drama is the best way to make a community toxic. Once your community becomes toxic, it's hard to clean it up and make it non-toxic. Drama can hurt feelings and create enemies. Try to resolve it quickly and shut it down from the public as soon as you can.

We all got them. What are yours?

I typically engage my existing network for outdoor related forums. Everything else, I mix copywriting and social media promotion and schedule daily promotional posts for the forum. I'll also go to promotion forums and admin forums and utilize their promotion features. How about you all?

Have you ever wanted to create your own forum software? If I had the know-how, I'd love to create software. It would most likely be free software because I don't want to hassle making it into a business. How about everyone else?

I barely remember it and I owned it LOL

Yeah that is true. I guess I'm kind of hypocritical in a way because I initially left vb because they wanted to break everything apart. I do believe that was my reasoning. I guess I'm so used to not having an all-in-one platform that I got used to not having it, LOL. It'll grow on me. I'm using all the services, anyways.

I used MyBB for a long time. I forgot all about this site. I think it was my first admin forum! https://web.archive.org/web/20090203011908/http://adminquest.com/forum/index.php You can't really see the theme sadly.

Yeah. I'm mixed on them. For a forum like this, where members will already probably know what they are for, then I enable them. But for my hiking forum or biking forum, no one really understand what they are and I want to make engagement as simple as possible, so I don't enable them.

I agree with that. A community manager role would be good for this on a forum, but as the forum grows bigger, the CM could appoint mentors and change their role to lead them.

I really like how they have outlines their team roles https://mybb.com/about/team/roles/ I think it's good to be organized like that as a provider of something

I am a paid community manager for Copyblogger, a long-standing website. I believe around 2006 is when it opened. Anyways, online community retention is successful through onboarding. We get new members (paid) and then onboard them to be successful at learning how to be a copywriter. I feel the same tactic is needed on forums. How many members join and then that's it, they become inactive? If you create an onboarding strategy where you engage the members and get them to seamlessly integrate into the community, you'll likely have more active members and higher engagement rates. What do you all think about this idea?

I almost wonder if separating the articles, blogs, groups as official addons would be better? They could lower the price of the forum. I say that with a reason. You could disable all the extra stuff if you wanted to right? But those files are still there and code is still calling it right? Even if the return it saying "Hey I'm disabled for now" but there is still bloat in the package on your server. Any thoughts on that?

Me and you are a lot alike! When I left forums for a while it was because I was in pain, a drunk, and extremely depressed. It took a long, hard, and dark road to get me out of all that. The outdoors is what saved me. But I find it funny that people kept joining while the forum just waited around for you to come back -- if only it was a bunch of active members who policed themselves and you came back to a self-created big board. All of a sudden, they're like, who's this AWS guy LOL.

The big thing about it is not feeling like you need to inject your keyword a certain amount of time. You could get away just putting it in all the places above and maybe two times in your content. A lot of people still make the keyword stuffing mistake.

Thank you! I look forward to it :)

Here's my simple formula for SEO. 1. Choose your topic based on the needs, wants, and pain points of your target audience. You have to "listen" to what they want before you know what they want. 2. Research a suitable keyword. Use a tool like SEM Rush, Uber Suggest, or something like that to make life easier. You want a good search volume but a low competition score. Don't use the same keyword more than once. A longtail keyword is going to be easier to work with. 3. Write the best content you can. Search your keyword on Google and open up the first 10 results. Make sure you include what they include in your own words, but fill in the gaps that they miss. Long-form is best. 1,500+ words. 4. Keyword injection: *Title *H1 header *H2 header *First sentence in first paragraph *Add keyword to a few more places throughout content where it smoothly integrates in *Image ALT tag *URL slug 5. Submit and promote. That's it! That's what I do to get on page one of Google.

I just want to update this. LOL. I still have a lot of websites LOL some things never change!!! I don't do weather websites anymore. I'm pretty good at marketing and SEO now. I have a hiking blog and getting my posts on Google page one isn't that hard anymore. I'm still a male... I'm not 25 :( I'm 40. I still live in Southern Illinois. I'm still a county boy, but a married one! I don't chase storms anymore and thankfully I don't coal mine anymore. I work in investigations. Now I hike and bike quite a bit.

For those of you who use vBulletin, what would you like them to add to it? What features would make vBulletin even better out of the box?

True. I need to get me a .forum one and mess around with it. I registered CommunityManager.blog and plan to make a community tips blog with it. It's nice getting those easier domains with all these new TLDs. Sometimes, trying to think of a .com and then getting one that's available can be a migraine of an activity.

In my 20s I thought of myself as an expert, in my 40s? I'm a newbie LOL My 18 year old is still showing me how to use my iPhone LOL

I feel like I remember my first forum being a perl script. Shortly after that, someone told me about PhpBB.

:o I want to say that's higher than I'm willing to pay but in reality, I am working on a paid community on Circle and it's $100 a month.

And what's crazy is Vanilla, I think, has been around for a long time, but they went modern really early.

It took me a minute to figure out categories and boards. It came default with a "Forums" category and one board under it. They call it channel, I call it board LOL. But I had to create a secondary category under Forums to make the category name show up on index and then child forums under the categories. So, like three deep to get a board to display under a visible category. That took me about a half hour to figure out. It's lacking some feature. Security questions, likes, etc. I figured vb would already have that TBH to compete with XF.

I have a few .blog ones. But I don't have .forum ones yet. I'm so Grumpy Old Man Old School about domain names. I am one of those, .com or nothing, but I realize I need not to be that! My biggest concern was whether they were going to be widely used for spam and people would just block the whole domain.