List your FORUMS site here

Mine is currently down for repairs and upgrading. I’ll post the link when it is back up.

The site has a very plentiful user base (student’s at Texas Tech University). It started out as a rating system (much like HotorNot) and has grown into a portal/community for the students, complete with personal blogs, message boards, and student editorials. We are continually having to upgrade the site so that we don’t run out of bandwidth or space…

None of the owners make any profit from the site, every penny of the ads goes right back into making the site better and more enjoyable. We didn’t get into it for money, we wanted to make something and let the students enjoy it.

There were/are some problems with keeping people on topic in the forums so we created an IRC channel and tried to funnel those types of things to the chatroom.

I started my second message board in late August of this year. I previously ran a sports board which I then merged and now occasionally admin.

I then picked up on another of my great interests which is music. I started On That Note Forums with some great graphical help from two people I met through this site!

We had some decisions to make whether to go with a guitar-only forum, or to branch out to other instruments. To start, we began with just Guitar, Bass, but have an “Other Instruments” forum to leave room for any instrument talk, and appropiate forums can/will be added as they are needed. We kept the name (On That Note) universal, to allow for the need of any expansion on to more instruments.

In addition to instruments, we have various music chat forums that any musician would find helpful, including songwriting, and music accessories.

Currently our member base is small (only 15 members), but I hope with time and some more publicity the forums will be able to take off. It’s fun for me as music (guitar in particular) is a favorite hobby of mine, and this is just a way for me and other people to be able to enjoy that. :slight_smile:

h

I just launched my forum at www.whistlestopper.com and it’s in its very early stages. Very early. I think I may have the same problem as petertdavis: I have too many forums for too few members, and I may prune them soon.

Most of the forums that I frequent, I found through members of other forums I frequent. That’s the route I’m taking now with this forum. After it grows to some measure of respectability, I will likely invest some advertising dollars, but it’s not a commercial site so my budget will be limited. Then of course there is SEO, which I have not done yet.

http://www.clantemplates.com :slight_smile: the forums are popular now :smiley:

The community site I run is done on a hobby style basis, and so is not worked on to great detail yet. However I am building (with the help of naramation :D) a CMS to controll the whole site.

You can see it here www.aberystwythlifeboat.org.uk the main part of the sites the ‘shouts’ (rescues) are updated usually within the hour of it happening. The forums are a newish addition and something I am trying to grow. As for advertising, it gets mentioned in our ‘shout’ newsletter occasionnaly. A lot of our traffic comes from search engines, especially after the boat has gone out on a shout, people see it go and look on the internet for info, especially if we set the maroons (explosive, flys 1000ft into the air and explodes) off, the whole town knows then. We have the web address outside the station too.

The local press dont seem to want to report the site,or mention it even after lifting information from it for there papers, which is a pain.

We are trying to get more general lifeboat fans to use it too, but that isnt working so well :slight_smile:

It does however get plugged by the BBC, when they do a lifeboat or aberystwyth story on there ‘Wales’ pages they usaually post a link to us, which helps. I spent ages trying to get link partners but it seems most are dead now. I will try some more avenues for getting visitors, as and when I get time.

The important thing is that the shouts are kept fresh upto date, and people have a chance to ask questions etc, things should be ok.

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

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!

www.mattsbabes.co.uk/forums/

So far nothing that I have tried has worked. :frowning:

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 :slight_smile:

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 :slight_smile:, 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 :slight_smile:

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 ?

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.

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

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

Hello everyone, I’m new to Sitepoint myself, so I guess this will also be my introduction. :slight_smile:

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.

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…

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

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.

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

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.