Any recommendations for Social Networking Scripts (a la MySpace)?

The topic is related to a specific women’s health issue.

The initial site was only content, and a guestbook. The more content I put up, the more the guestbook started to turn into a ‘conversation’ book, so I added a message board 6 years ago.

Switching to vB was a good move, since the more people post, the more content the site has. The archives are a huge source of traffic. I notice in my own web searches that I often end up at another websites vB archive.

Content is king…if you provide a valuable resource of content to your target audience, and give them a forum (board) to comment on the content, they will keep coming back…but again, content is king.

I also keep a VERY tight rein on my topic. It’s VERY narrow. In fact, it’s so narrow, it never occurred to me that 500 people in 5 years would find the site.

Guess I was wrong

(If you like smilies, you can add them to your hearts content with vB…we have a ton, all ordered by category. The members love them.)

Even though my friend says that ALICIA is going to be a smokin’ application, I’m a bit hesitant, because I don’t know if Google can spider the built in forum. No Google = no site for me.

Heh, I was just thinking that yesterday, but I don’t think I’ll get a lot of visitors from Google searches on forum content, the subject matter is either too esoteric or too broad. I’ll have two kinds of content, 1) an extremely accurate but very simple astrological test for relationship intensity which is easy to code into a profile search and 2) a large database of interpretations. There are 600 ‘aspects’, each with a unique interpretation, a couple usually having 20 to 30 in their comparison. I can probably find half a dozen sets of interpretations already typed up on the web, although the first one I found was mediocre. Which is why I want the interpretations to be ratable.

I see why you are fixated on Google finding your site, it never really even occurred to me that Google might have trouble finding pages on sites.

I didn’t mean ‘forum’ content, I meant site content.

That said, if you do have ‘forum’ content, it’s because people are posting in your forum. If they found your site, then other people will too.

You can use the Overture Keyword Tool to see how many searches are performed on keywords related to your topic.

My topic is actually quite narrow. The average person on the street has absolutely never heard of it.

If you’re intent is to build a community, they have to be coming together around a central topic…that’s what you need to focus on.

If they’re just coming to get some type of astrological [service], you aren’t really building a community, but a service site.

Personally, I think the more narrow a topic, the easier it is to find a loyal fan base.

For instance, it would be FAR easier to start a forum dedicated to ‘Slinky’ memorabilia than a forum about ‘gadgets’ or toys from the 70’s.

Do I want to talk about Slinky? No. But I’m sure there are some people who do.

Actually, now that I think about it, I’m going to run a search on Slinky

AstroLife.com is a nice site, but it doesn’t do much of what I want to do. I want to give automated astrological evaluations of relationships. It will be undistilled and voluminous, but having more content rather than less could be a virtue here.

I do have a problem here, while astrology is a great match making tool, astrology in and of itself has nothing to do with dating, and dating isn’t even a topic as such, just an intent. I don’t have high hopes for a forum initially. However, I think I have something much more visceral and compelling than a mere topic, but it requires a critical mass of participating members. It is very specific, as you’ve stressed, but in a different way.

There are two aspects in astrology that determine the chemistry between you and a man, the aspect between your venus and his mars, and between your moon and his sun. If his mars is in aspect to your venus then there is a strong physical attraction. If his sun is in aspect to your moon then there is something deeply compelling and masculine about him with a potential for a strong psychic and emotional bond. I’ve never seen an enduring relationship that lacked both of these aspects, except in couples that met as seniors, which read as best friends rather than lovers.

About one in 10 men have their mars in aspect to your venus, and another one in 10 have their sun in aspect to you moon. That one in a hundred who has both will be someone you have an intense electrical reaction too, someone that knocks your socks off. So a large group of people can be broken up into 100 divisions, and within those divisions everyone will have this electric reaction with all members of the opposite sex. But I figure I need to have at least 1000 active members in order to have any activity at all, since that would be only 10 people per board.

If enough people got involved to reach a higher critical mass, I think it could transform society. Even though I’ve almost never seen an enduring relationship that lacked both venus/mars and sun/moon aspects, I’ve seldom seen a relationship that has both. If true love and lifelong intense passion were extremely common rather than extremely rare, the world would be a different place. I think astrology is a lost science that, if applied properly, can really change the world, and it’s main application is in relationships.

Well, MySpace’s forums aren’t much to look at. Most dating sites don’t have any forum at all. Until I reach a critical mass the only forum activity I would expect is in the astrological interpretations themselves. (I want people to be able to comment on interpretations and add their own.)

As for using the astrological service without really using the site – I want this relationship evaluation to work on searched profiles. They’ll also be able to input the birth data, but it is primarily for looking at profiles. It’s like a super-expanded profile.

I think you are definitely right about having something that is narrowly focused. I want boards that are narrowly focused in terms of everyone having very similar or strongly compatible romantic chemistry. It’s not a topic, and ice breaking could be a problem, but it would be a forum exclusively for people who came up as an extremely strong match with you, largely the same people you’d find in a search.

Honestly…I think you’re overthinking this.

Your topic [generally speaking] is “astrology & relationships”…Your forum areas could revolve around related discussion areas (relationships at work, at home, people chould offer to read each others charts, people could give advice on making charts, etc.) That’s narrow enough, while still leaving room for lots of discussion.

You could have a free ‘basic’ search like the one at tampaforums.com (acutally, that’s a mod of the vBulletin search, so it’s acutally more than basic, but for your purposes, I’ll call it basic.)

You could then have a premium matching area. Maybe use Dating Box for this, and have the profile fields customized to detailed astrology stuff.

Dating Box can be fully integrated with vBulletin, so both applications will share the same userbase.

Hire a designer to make it all look starry-eyed and pretty, and boom…you’re ready to open the doors.

Make the boards free and easy to join…make the dating portion a ‘fee service’ (or maybe offer free premium meberships to the first 200 members…)

If you don’t go with Dating Box, Matrimony Zone (or whatever it’s called…the one by Vastal) might also work. It, too, can be integrated with vBulletin.

My advice for you…don’t overthink this in the beginning. As your user base grows, their usage patterns of your site will give you more direction, and define what your site is.

I just caught this…

You’re kidding me, right? (and I say that with love…)

Are you going to screen every single member who joins? You’ll never sleep.

What you want are boards populated by: People who believe and/or are interested in the influence of the stars on their relationships.

Let the chemistry happen from there…

(acutally, I saw two great mods for vBulletin you might like. One autmatically puts a person’s sign in their postbit, and the other is a ‘secret admirer’ add on. Both are great for ‘ice breaker’ chemistry things…)

there’s a myspace like script called phpfox -

No screening, it’s extremely simple to automate, it can be done in just a few lines of code.

Oh ye of little faith, this stuff is deadly accurate. I’m a software engineer, so I have no vested interest in astrology, I would just do charts for friends, co-workers and their mates or love interests. I’ve been doing it since I was in college, so about 20 years now. Theories make predictions and you evaluate theories by testing those predictions. Sun sign horoscopes don’t make testable predictions; the predictions are too vague and unquantifiable. The only prediction that astrology genuinely make about sun signs is that people who have their suns 54-66 degrees apart (sextile) or 114-126 (trine) will tend to be good friends, especially if there is a lack of adverse aspects.

Real astrology makes predictions about personalities and personality phases that are extremely specific and easy to test. Signs only give vague outlines, aspects are the meat and bones of astrology. Instead of there being only 12 possible predictive categories there are 600. Each category is far more narrowly defined and specific than with signs, so their predictions are much more readily quantifiable and testable. Here are a few tests from skeptical co-workers:

A skeptical co-worker brought me an unnamed birth date and wanted to know what that person was like. When I had a chance to check it I was shocked, it was the most tense, and intense, chart that I’d ever seen, almost all the aspects were squares. I went to his office and said, “Who IS that? It’s a human buzz saw!” He had given me the birth date and time of his idol, Bruce Lee. He smiled from ear to ear and said, “Inter-esting!” ‘Human buzz-saw’ is an extremely specific description of Bruce Lee’s unique qualities.

At the Peter Norton Group an engineer heard me claim 99% accuracy in determining the quality and intensity of romantic attraction between any two people that I’d never met, given their birth data. With great vibrato he said, “********! I’m going to test you!” When predictions are very specific, tests are vastly easier to postulate and conduct. So he brought me 10 sets of data. 4 were made up controls (a good test always has controls), 4 were old relationships and 2 were new love interests. As I went through the list his face turned brighter and brighter red. When I was done he said that the first sentence out of my mouth after initially scanning the chart had summed up each relationship, or immediately identified a control as being no significant relationship. I was lucky, he was a lady-killer who was good at reading chemistry, which made the correlations much more distinct. He started studying it intensely after that, blown away that it is true, and after 6-12 months he said something very true, “It doesn’t tell you anything that you can’t already tell on your own if you are good at reading chemistry.” I said yes, but astrology allows you to do it without having to meet anyone, and it could do it for the majority who can’t read chemistry.

RUN!!!

That’s a great one, I have looked into it.

Max, how do you think it compares to BuddyZone?

I have never heard of it until now. It looks decent, very similar to phpfox. Sorry I can’t help!

PhpFoX supports CSS profile customization and has a support forum while BuddyZone does not. Maybe BuddyZone’s phone support is extremely good, but on the home page it is obvious that it is an Indian out-sourcing company, notorious for poor phone support. I have met some good Hindu programmers, but most of them write very user unfriendly code.

Yea, they are all in India
I wanted to buy this a while back, but all the legal crap and stuff made me nervous and I left it at that

All that scripts looks rather crappy, and I bet they fail under heavy load.

Wow…those are some pretty biased and sweeping statements…

I’ve had good experience with providers from India, and bad experiences. Same as with US providiers.

Computer science is flooded with Hindus, I’ve had many experiences with them since college. I have a great deal of respect for Hinduism, but cultures have a personality and India’s is geeky and introverted. It also depends on the region. Southern India is a STRANGE place, like a whole culture dropped in from another planet. Eastern India is more progressive and all the East Indians I’ve known have been great people, but they don’t leave India that much. West India is sort of like the NY, NY of India: tech support problems with Southern Indians are usually language problems, but with Western Indians it is more likely to be an attitude problem. Northern Indians are like the Eastern Indians in terms coming from functional societies, but Northern Indians are more extroverted. It is sort of like Europe, it is hard to generalize about all of Europe, but different countries have distinct personalities. India is very diverse, but some Hindu programmers, especiallly from the West and South, can present some substantial difficulties on a regular basis.

has anyone ever used or heard of “datecomm” … they say its a myspace clone…and lookin at alot of the sites that are made by it…looks like it is…you can find it here…

http://www.e-cbd.biz/community_script.html

i was about to purchase it…but thought i could use some other opinions before i spend over 200 dollars…is it open source?..i need somethin open source

thx

Hi,
What’s the “legal crap and stuff” that you are talking about?
I am looking at this script also.

thanks,

If you have to pay, then by definition it is not open source.

when do you think alicia is coming out?(: