Expanding the community

[lodist]

Hi guys! Remember me? I was the site on the admin podcast about stealing members. I took your advice at heart and worked hard and now my community is steady and flourishing.

I think its time for me to expand my niche, as my current niche has been very much been filled to its full potential. I am planning to expand the forum to a more generic domain name (lodist.com, of course).

I need your advice on the best way to do so.

I have outlined things that I thought of
Upgrade from phpbb2, I am thinking vB, but don't have much money. Is it possible/allowed to buy a pre owned licence?

Make a domain redirect. That is have thesansa.com/*** -> sansa.lodist.com so no links should be broken.

but I am not experienced in this so I need your help.

Basically, people in my forum are keen to expand as well so the social aspect is pretty much set. Basically I wan't to expand into the music market, but that niche may be too big so fine tuning will be needed.

Can you guys help me? Please outline implications, tips

Cheers.

[TheAnarchist]

# Jelsoft may, at its discretion, allow you to transfer your license to another party, providing the license:

* has not already been transferred in the previous 12 months; and
* was purchased more than 3 months in the past.
* is an active owned license

# Please note, leased licenses are not eligible for transfer


http://www.vbulletin.com/order/license_agreement.php , 7 March 2007, 4:57pm Australian EST

That's what I was able to come up with, in regard to purchasing a license from a current licensee.

Forgive me, but I don't exactly understand what you are trying to do. My understanding is that you and your members are keen to expand - but I do not know what you want to expand from, or what you want to expand to.

Perhaps you could offer some information to us in that respect?

[lodist]

OK basically the forum at the moment is product related (mp3 player to be exact), so anybody with the mp3 player can come to the forum and discuss the player. Where we are going to expand to is quite fuzzy, but we are leaning to a music based forum (maybe a lifestyle/music/technology type forum). In technical terms, i plan to upgrade the forum software as well as to change the domain name.

Hope this helps.

[iFroggy]

I'm glad to hear that you are doing well. Generally, I like to keep sites on their own domain, so I'd do that.

I haven't done much with vBulletin, so I can't really help you there. It's a nice piece of software. phpBB is nice, too. If you like phpBB, keep using it. If you want vBulletin, buy it. At the end of the day, your work is more important than the software you are using, as long as you use something decent.