List your FORUMS site here

[DarkAngelBGE]

I am building a community for a game developer, Wildfire Games. It's a forum network, I use IPB, skinned it, made big modifications to it and it has currently 130 members.

http://forums.wildfiregames.com/wfg

[stoli_sambuca]

Here's the address; http://www.cgedonline.net/forum/en/. It is becoming a community. Initially, I created categories to discuss college, university, and online distance education provider, but lately, I am making it more like a place for working professionals to discuss their career interest and advancement. How they can further their education given their time and money, etc. These are the people who are interested in online education (which is the main topic of the site), so I figure that's the kind of direction I should take. Take a look and if you have time, post a couple of messages. Thanks!

[Matthew_Benstead]

www.mattsbabes.co.uk/forums/

So far nothing that I have tried has worked.

[Logikos]

www.computerproblems.org is my site that i have been working on. I don't actually own the site, a friend of mine does. Seeing he has little knowledge on HTML and PHP i thought i would help him out some. Plus he knows I'm extremely fimillar with the vbulletin software.

Anyways.. The site launched On the 31st of may and sat for about a month with not much work done to it. Then money started to be poored into the site. Much of it in advertising. We don't have very many members now, but since we started to advertise we get 1000s of visitors daily. With maybe a sign up every three days or so. But running a site were we provide complely Free computer support, we are not expecting very many unique visitors. Seeing if there problem has been fixed then they probably wont visit the site until a new one emerges.

With the help of Abe and I we thought the site would look at its best in this layout and design. I just need to align the forums with the Right table and the forum home should be just about finished. To boost things up a little for our members we decided to add a store. Where the more post you make and such you gain what we call CP Cash. That will allow you to buy our many products with-out the use of money. Some featured products are Hard Drives, Software, Email Service (Hivemail) and web hosting. Of course brand new items. Not used

Now I'm in the middle of coding and tweaking a portal page. which will be based around the forums only. You can see a example of what might go up by clicking Here , Were still undecided on that layout. We'll see what happens.

Just so others know. Questions on our site are being answered by professionals with the following Certifications.

• Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer
• Microsoft Certified Systems Administrator
• Microsoft Certified Professional
• Certified Computer Service Technician
• CompTIA Network+ Certified
• CompTIA A+ Certified

Please i would love to hear what you have to think about out site. I enjoy reading what people like and dislike about any site. Makes my job much easier

[WebCrawler]

i made a small modification to phpBB to allow google to spider the site more freely

Does it mean that the Forums software like IPB, PHPBB, VBPortal are not search engine friendly? Do i require to tweak few codes to make the Forum spider friendly? I am using Invision Power Board.

This is a interesting part of the topics Posted by Peter Davis and till date I found, expertexchange.com able to show every topics/threads results in a Search Engine. how is it possible ?

[hotnuts21]

Invisions latest release 1.2 has search engine friendly urls and should be spidered, v1.1.2 (i think) had an option in the users controll panel to hide the session id, this is now in the admin panel in 1.2. There is a mod for v1.1.2 and earlier to add an admin controll to remove the session id from the url, this will allow the spiders to get going. My suggestions is upgrade and resubmit your forum mainpage you should be fine then.

[rsdl]

http://dfexchange.ca is the site i've been working for the past year or so. It's basically an art and literature community for British Columbia, the province where i live. We launched about a year ago (march) and have been getting members VERY slowly since then. Right now we're working on a redesign of the site.

cheers
-rsdl

[Classified]

I'm just starting this one, but here's what I got in the past three days, http://www.jonescomputersolutions.com/jcsbd/

[Lanzer_]

Hello everyone, I'm new to Sitepoint myself, so I guess this will also be my introduction. ^_^

I've created an anime style roleplaying community called Gaia Online. Currently getting a lot of activities from younger audience who like to role play with characters that users can create then customize. Others just like to do general chatting on all sorts of subjects. Hope to break 100,000 users before December.

http://www.go-gaia.com


Desperately looking for PHP enthusiasts to help develop the community with us. [img]images/smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

[Mike Panic]

Does it mean that the Forums software like IPB, PHPBB, VBPortal are not search engine friendly? Do i require to tweak few codes to make the Forum spider friendly? I am using Invision Power Board.

This is a interesting part of the topics Posted by Peter Davis and till date I found, expertexchange.com able to show every topics/threads results in a Search Engine. how is it possible ?

anything dynamic is tuff to spider out of the box, because it's always changing... add to that a session id and google all but chokes. the mod i did to the forum software was noticed the first week after putting it on... and now, about 5 months after the fact, and partly due to adsense, google runs rampant thru the site. last month it spidered IPF 69,000 times eating up over 2 gigs of b/w

[WebCrawler]

anything dynamic is tuff to spider out of the box, because it's always changing... add to that a session id and google all but chokes. the mod i did to the forum software was noticed the first week after putting it on... and now, about 5 months after the fact, and partly due to adsense, google runs rampant thru the site. last month it spidered IPF 69,000 times eating up over 2 gigs of b/w

among 4 websites displayed with your sig, which site you are talking about..

[iKwak]

Hello everyone, I'm new to Sitepoint myself, so I guess this will also be my introduction. ^_^

I've created an anime style roleplaying community called Gaia Online. Currently getting a lot of activities from younger audience who like to role play with characters that users can create then customize. Others just like to do general chatting on all sorts of subjects. Hope to break 100,000 users before December.

http://www.go-gaia.com


Desperately looking for PHP enthusiasts to help develop the community with us. [img]images/smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

Your forum is very nice! I love the color layout and the images.
Did you create the banners, layout and the forum yourself?

Good luck with the 100,000 members goal.

[csharpe77]

I just added a community to my site. Nothing fancy, but you asked for it.

http://www.cinemaeye.com/forum/

So far, growth has been very slow, but I'm still glad I added it. It seems like once people find it, they really enjoy the place. I'm going to try a few things like running exclusive features in the forums, etc. I'm always open to suggestions. I'm very new to this whole thing, but having a great time.

[csharpe77]

Mike Panic,

I am using phpbb as well. Very curious as to how to make it more Google-friendly. Is their any information you can point me to regarding this? Thanks!

Christopher

[Lanzer_]

Your forum is very nice! I love the color layout and the images.
Did you create the banners, layout and the forum yourself?

Good luck with the 100,000 members goal.

I happen to partner with a few artists when working on the site. All of which are members of the art studio called Studio XD (www.studioxd.com).

They're involved in comic books mainly, with titles like X-Men Revolution, Robotech, Street Fighter, Thunder Cats, etc.

[AsianGirl]

my community
http://www.iasian.net/board

not many posts and members yet...our site is less than 2 months old ...hopefully, it will grow

[AsianGirl]

Lanzer_: your site is totally awesome...i really love it....wish mine like that

[WebCrawler]

http://www.go-gaia.com Desperately looking for PHP enthusiasts to help develop the community with us. [img]images/smilies/biggrin.gif[/img]

Online only since a few months, the boards have known since a faster-than-imaginable growth, having at the time of this interview more than 4 million posts and 80000 users. How true it is ? [img]images/smilies/tongue.gif[/img] btw, I am presently devloping a site for 9000 users community base...replaced 512DDR, celeron, 80GB HDD but still slow, what abt yours ?

[AsianGirl]

by the way Lanzer_, may i ask how did you get that much traffic for only a few months? what techniques did you use? did you spend a lot of money on advertising?

[Lanzer_]

Online only since a few months, the boards have known since a faster-than-imaginable growth, having at the time of this interview more than 4 million posts and 80000 users. How true it is ? [img]images/smilies/tongue.gif[/img] btw, I am presently devloping a site for 9000 users community base...replaced 512DDR, celeron, 80GB HDD but still slow, what abt yours ?

Hi webcrawler, the user count is true, though personally I don't think user count is of big relavance since it might just reflect the age of the site and not the activity. (the post count isn't technically true since I delete anything over a month old on most forums) A more relavant count would be the number of users on-line during peak hours and new users signing up per day. When we had 9000 users there were about 200 users online during the day. The celeron 1.3 with 1GB RAM was starting to slow down, and when we reached 250 online users we had to upgrade. Actually, that was before I did all the forum optimizations and learned about the server configuration tricks. Wonder how much better it would have ran with what I have now.

Today I manage 2 graphics server, 2 forum servers, 1 server for other parts of the site like the store and the art arena, and 1 database backend. More details are in a thread I responded yesterday:

http://www.sitepointforums.com/showt...hreadid=131796

I came across sitepoint in search of other forums and admins managing sites similar to ours for tips on maintaining and configuring servers since I'm still a newbie on so many things, especially on strategies in expanding with more servers, clustering, and all that good stuff.

[Lanzer_]

by the way Lanzer_, may i ask how did you get that much traffic for only a few months? what techniques did you use? did you spend a lot of money on advertising?

Hello, in terms of site promotion I don't know of any secret for I'm not a marketing guru. I just listen to ideas and tips from everyone I talked to. I've led to believe that it isn't about promotion but more about the focus on "visitor's interest", more like spending all the time and effort into making sure that there is something to ensure repeated visits, or something to make the visitor want to invite their friends over, so to speak. Or in another words, something to counter the "if you build it, they will come" philosiphy.

[StateDOG]

My community, MissSportsTalk was launched in May of '02 with phpBB running it. It got a few initiall signups, but because of the nature of the subject matter (high school sports) it was pretty dormant for most of the summer. But it picked up slowly through the fall of 02 and then saw a flury of activity during the football playoffs.

It did okay during the spring sememster and then got really slow again during the summer. I used that time to convert over to IPB then upgrade to IPB 1.2. Even though I was using a different skin when I was with phpBB, I'm still using the default IPB skin (I know, that screams "Lack Of Attention" really clearly.) But most members haven't cared. I still think that if I get a custom skin made and add a few features, it would do even better. But word of mouth has been the greatest publicity for me, as well as posting a link now and then to some larger, instate university sports boards. I've even had some people say they've surfed in by way of Google. But signups and activity has been very encouraging the past 3 or 4 months.

I'm in the top 10 for searches of both Mississippi Sports and Mississippi High School Sports. So that's not bad. But I really want more representation from the entire state...most of the members are from the north half.

A few of you that I've looked at have some really nice looking IPB skins. I might send you a PM about designing one for me soon.... And I'd like to place some local ads on it soon so I can let it be more than just a hobby and maybe even break even!

[AsianGirl]

i must say...you've done a great job Lanzer! keep up the good work

[Anacrusis]

Here's my community.
www.internet-clubhouse.com

It's a fairly large site and it's getting bigger all the time with more features and enhancements always being added. My member base is beginning to grow as well. I've been working on it for about a year and really havn't done much to promote it. I'm in all the major search engines and I posted my link on a few other sites but that's about it. The main way my site is promoted is through my forum sigs and word of mouth.

[pgowder]

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