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A new chart has been released showcasing how AI overviews has been effecting some website’s traffic thus far. Which means, it’s a good idea to diversify your traffic sources.

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X, is no stranger to the news. What with the reported purchase of X by xAIfor $33 billion, attackers claiming responsibility for platform outages, and X password scams targeting users. Now, another shock awaits the users of what used to be Twitter: a self-proclaimed data enthusiast has just given away what is claimed to be a database containing details of some 200 million X user records. Here’s what we know so far. [HEADING=1]Attackers Exploited X Vulnerability To Grab User Information[/HEADING] The story started in January 2022, when Twitter, as it was then, learned of a vulnerability through its bug bounty program that could enable an attacker to access data relating to platform users just by knowing an email address or telephone number. By July of that year, Twitter found that someone had exploited the vulnerability before it could be fixed and was selling a large amount of user data that had been collected in this way. “After reviewing a sample of the available data for sale, we confirmed that a bad actor had taken advantage of the issue before it was addressed,” Twitter confirmed at the time. Fast forward to today, and that incident would appear to have come back to bite X users once more. Now, a data enthusiast called ThinkingOne says they have accessed that data and added it to a further breach, which they claimed was leaked in January 2025. According to a posting on a well-known data breach forum, they decided to give the data away for free, having tried to contact X but with no response. According to the Safety Detectives cybersecurity teamwhich broke the story, ThinkingOne claims to “only have included records of X users present in both datasets.” The result is a 34 GB CSV file containing 201,186,753 data entries in total. It is understood that the data, which has been verified in part at least to be genuine by the Safety Detectives researchers, included: X screen name and user IDs, full names, locations, email addresses, follower counts, profile data, time zones, profile images and more [HEADING=1]In Conversation With ThinkingOne Who Released The Latest X Files[/HEADING] I have had an email conversation with ThinkingOne, who told me they don’t consider themselves a hacker but rather a data enthusiast who tries to ensure everything they do is legal. The real story (to me, at least) is that 2.8 billion records were exfiltrated from Twitter/X,” ThinkingOne told me. “This is by far the largest social media breach ever, in terms of number of users, and there is at least a possibility that the person responsible for the breach has other data including emails, phone numbers and passwords,” ThinkingOne claimed. The huge number of user records exceeds the normal figures thrown around of a few hundred million users because the latter is a monthly active users amount. The users who logged on during a given period, in other words. “The dataset leaked in January, 2025 included over 2.8 billion unique Twitter IDs and screennames,” ThinkingOne told me, “I checked a representative sample of 100 and 92 had the correct user ID and screenname.’ All of which left ThinkingOne, well, thinking, “how could someone enumerate all Twitter user IDs, unless they were an employee or this was a very serious hacking job?” This is a breaking story, and I will update it as more information becomes available. I have reached out to X for a statement. Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2025/03/31/hacker-claims-to-have-leaked-200-million-x-user-data-records-for-free/

Last month we reported that Google News Publisher Center changes are coming, well those changes should have happened and been fully completed by today. Google updated its help document on the topic to say "Google News is fully transitioning to automatically generated publication pages in late March 2025." Late March is now and the transition should be complete. In fact, that help document page was significantly updated, so those who do SEO for news publishers are a news publisher themselves, should review it. Here is what has changed or what is new: Gogole also updated this section: Google also added three new sections to this document: [HEADING=1](1) Global distribution settings[/HEADING] By default, links to your content in Google News are available to users worldwide. To streamline publisher setup, starting next month, publishers will no longer be able to use Publisher Center to restrict their content from appearing in certain countries, with the exception of News Showcase panels. Users will find content in Google News according to their language and region preferences. Learn how to check or change your Google News settings. News Showcase publishers will be able to use Publisher Center to allow or block users in specific countries from seeing News Showcase panels. [HEADING=1](2) Text-to-speech distribution options on Google Assistant[/HEADING] News content on the web may be used in Google Assistant’s text-to-speech feature to respond to user queries about a specific news topic (example: “Play news about bitcoin”) within the US. The Assistant topical news feature where snippets of an article are played on speakers via Text to Speech will be discontinued outside the US soon, and the opt-out settings for use within the US are changing. To block your content from being part of this user experience, you can use the nopagereadaloud HTML meta tag on your website. For more information, refer to our Help Center article: Google Read Aloud user agent. [HEADING=1](3) Video news on Google News and Google Assistant[/HEADING] Similarly, publishers will no longer be able to use Publisher Center to submit YouTube content for consideration in Google News or Google Assistant. As a reminder, publishers can continue sharing their video content on YouTube. YouTube content is also automatically considered for Google Assistant. Source: https://www.seroundtable.com/google-news-automatically-generated-publications-39149.html

I agree. With ad companies paying less and more users relying on ad blockers, traditional ad revenue isn’t as reliable as it used to be. While running ads can be a decent starting point, it’s probably better to explore other monetization options in the long run. Diversifying revenue streams, like premium memberships, sponsored content, or digital products, which might be a smarter approach for a forum’s sustainability.

I currently rely on SEO and social media to drive traffic to my forum. In addition to that, I receive traffic from a few other websites on Neocities, as well as a couple of forums. Right now, there’s about 6-10 Neocities sites are directly linking to my forum. Generally, I get around 10-30 visits per day from social media, while search engines send me about 80-200 visits daily. I focus on diversifying my traffic sources to maintain a steady and consistent flow of visitors. For promotion, I actively use Threads, Reddit, Quora, Bluesky, and Twitter. If it’s possible, I’ll try my best to share my forum on any platform that allows it. I also submit to my forum to online directories and other forums to get more visibility & to enable it to be seen by more users. I believe by adding it to directories and other forums its a great way to attract new users. I like adding my forum’s link to my signature as well.

I’ve used cloudflare in the past, but I’m currently not using a cdn. I’ll probably reimplement relatively soon though.

I’m currently listening to akon’s new song “never really Mattered”. [MEDIA=spotify]track:2ZcimQZ0Kpv4gcU2HUyOms[/MEDIA]

What type of forum do you currently run? What niche is it in? Are you the only staff member?

Free t shirts are an excellent viral marketing tactic. You never know who will be looking at your t shirts. This could also work for branded hats as well. Great thinking Otis! Giving away free ad space could also work as well depending on the type of community that you’re running.

Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental is Google's most advanced coding model yet. See it in action as it creates an interactive p5js demo of colorful boids inside a spinning hexagon. Prompt: p5js (no HTML) swarm of 30 colorful boids swimming inside a rotating hexagon. I like supernova nebulae. Try it for yourself in their AI studio: https://aistudio.google.com/app/prompts/new_chat?model=gemini-2.5-pro-exp-03-25 Or if you're a Gemini Advanced user, you can select it in the model dropdown on desktop and mobile: https://gemini.google.com/ You can read more about Gemini 2.5 in Google's blog: https://blog.google/technology/google-deepmind/gemini-model-thinking-updates-march-2025/?utm_source=yt&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=gdm Along with their website: https://deepmind.google/technologies/gemini/

Affiliate marketing is another monetization method you can use for your website, blog, or forum alongside advertisements. But should you use affiliate marketing to monetize your site? [HEADING=2]What is affiliate marketing?[/HEADING] Affiliate marketing is a performance-based advertising model where businesses (merchants) compensate third-party publishers (affiliates) for generating traffic or leads to their products or services. This is done through unique tracking links, with commissions earned when a sale occurs. Some companies offer high commissions, while others provide lower percentages, but the general commission rate ranges from 15% to 45% per sale. Affiliate marketing can also create a passive income stream for your website or forum. If your forum, blog, or website focuses on products like web hosting, games, toys, or other consumer goods, affiliate marketing can be an effective monetization strategy. It’s also less intrusive to users compared to traditional advertisements, as you’re simply embedding links within relevant threads or posts rather than displaying banner ads. You could implement banner ads if you'd like to, especially if the affiliate company is related to your niche and you believe it'll be quite beneficial to promote their banners instead of text links. So, what are your thoughts? Have you used affiliate marketing on your website, blog, or forum? Did it work well for you? What are some of your favorite affiliate marketing companies? Would you consider trying it on your site?

Hypervel is a Laravel-style PHP framework with native coroutine support for ultra-high performance. Hypervel ports many core components from Laravel while maintaining familiar usage patterns, making it instantly accessible to Laravel developers. The framework combines the elegant and expressive development experience of Laravel with the powerful performance benefits of coroutine-based programming. If you're a Laravel developer, you'll feel right at home with this framework, requiring minimal learning curve. This is an ideal choice for building microservices, API gateways, and high-concurrency applications where traditional PHP frameworks often encounter performance constraints. [HEADING=1]Why Hypervel?[/HEADING] While Laravel Octane impressively enhances your Laravel application's performance, it's crucial to understand the nature of modern web applications. In most cases, the majority of latency stems from I/O operations, such as file operations, database queries, and API requests. However, Laravel doesn't support coroutines - the entire framework is designed for a blocking I/O environment. Applications heavily dependent on I/O operations will still face performance bottlenecks. Consider this scenario: Imagine building an AI-powered chatbot where each conversation API takes 3-5 seconds to respond. With 10 workers in Laravel Octane receiving 10 concurrent requests, all workers would be blocked until these requests complete. For I/O-intensive scenarios, even with Laravel Octane's improvements, your application's ability to handle concurrent requests is still limited by the duration of these I/O operations. Hypervel addresses this issue by leveraging coroutines, allowing for efficient handling of concurrent I/O operations without blocking workers. This approach can significantly improve the performance and concurrency of applications with heavy I/O requirements. Moreover, it's unlikely that Laravel Octane will support coroutines in the near future (see this issue), given that only Swoole runtime currently supports this feature and considering backward compatibility with the framework and third-party packages. Source: https://hypervel.org/docs/introduction https://hypervel.org/ https://github.com/hypervel/hypervel

An ask me anything section is more so an area for users to get to know each and bond. It’s not designed for a feedback area. It really doesn’t add quality to a forum as it’s generally falls under “low quality” content and its quite similar to a forum games section. They’re good for boasting activity, but that’s all. If a forum is seeking new suggestion and opinions, a dedicated suggestions/feedback forum would work the best.

I recently purchased some chicken sandwiches from Dave’s hot chicken. I tried their hottest(spicy) chicken sandwich. It was good, but really spicy.

I think communities should focus on both niche and off topic content. You want to have a balance as off topic posts is where members form a bond and the niche areas is what your forum is all about. The niche areas will strive just like the off topic areas as long as you focus on both areas. There isn’t anything wrong with having an active off topic area and I believe community owners should embrace them more. Especially if your goal is to attract more members onto your community. It doesn’t dilute your forum unless you allow it to. Such as, if there’s more off topic forums than your niche areas.

There are many hosting providers that are available online today, but are there any particular ones that you won’t use no matter what? Personally, I wouldn’t use any providers that are under the umbrella of EIG, which includes Hostgator, Bluehost and a few others as their customer service usually lacks. I’ve also had a server from hostgator in the past and their service really sucked. What about you? What hosting providers do you refuse to use? For those that aren’t aware of EIG: https://hostscore.net/learn/eig-hosting/

Original source: https://www.gsqi.com/marketing-blog/reddit-ai-translations-google/ But should rankings in Google be surging for that AI translated content? In my post I explain the Reddit surge across countries, the translated content that’s ranking well, what Google’s stance has been about machine translating content, and more. The March 2025 core updatecompleted this morning and I’ve been sharing about the surges and drops I’m seeing across verticals. There have been some big swings with this update across sites, verticals, and countries. I will be sharing more about the update in the coming weeks after the dust settles. Well, yesterday Lily Ray shared about forums dropping overall and I have also seen that trend. And that’s big news considering how many forums surged with the “Hidden gems” update in the fall of 2023. Not all forums are dropping, but a number of them are tanking with this update. And that led me to call this the “Hiding Gems” update versus “Hidden Gems” update. And when talking about user-generated content (UGC), it’s to hard overlook the biggest and most visible of them all – Reddit. Yep, it looks like Reddit is surging again with the March core update. I know that’s hard to believe since it has skyrocketed in visibility since the fall of 2023, but I am seeing more surges across countries. And when taking a closer look at the increase, I’m seeing more of a surge in certain countries for Reddit, which led me to check the content that is surging in rankings. Based on checking that content, I saw many of Reddit’s AI translations in the mix. And it’s millions of translated urls ranking in Google for certain countries. For example in France: And here is the translated content with the tl=fr parameter, which links back to the original content. From what Reddit has explained, this is machine-translated content. As a reminder, Reddit explained last year that it would start using AI translation (machine translation) to translate content into several other languages. They started with French but now have expanded to a number of other languages. Actually, in their Q3 2024 quarterly earnings, Reddit explained they are spending millions of dollars per quarter on machine translation. Here is more from the article: In addition, they said the impact has been dramatic and even mention the benefit of that content getting indexed by Google. Note, Google has always said that auto-translating content using machine translation is not ok. Humans should be involved with the translation to make sure the content is not low quality. So translated content is fine, but auto-translated content is not fine (SEO-wise). You can see Google’s scaled content abuse spam policy below where it mentions auto-translating content. Can Reddit Do What Others Can’t Do? When the French translations began last year, I shared on X that other sites have gotten manual actions for pumping tons of auto-translations on their sites (if those auto-translations are indexable). I’ve had companies reach out in the past after receiving manual actions… In addition, some have gotten hit by spam updates, which are algorithmic. Regardless, most sites cannot get away with mass-translating content via AI (or machine translation tools) without getting hammered by Google. But Reddit is surging, and across countries and languages. Here is my tweet from last May when I read about Reddit’s auto-translations. In addition, and before you run and check this, remember that Reddit provides a robots.txt for Google and other search engines specifically, so you can’t see the directives without using a tool like the rich results test. You will see a blanket disallow instead (which again, isn’t really what Google sees). When using the rich results test, you can see that they are explicitly allowing crawling of those translated urls via Allow directives in their robots.txt file. Below, you can see the increases in visibility across several countries. I’ll just provide a few countries, but you can check the rest on your own. I have also provided a sample url below each country’s graph so you can see what that content looks like. I filtered the reporting by urls with the tl= parameter which is set for each language. Check out the increases below… Here is a sample url: Sample url: Sample url: Sample url: I’ll keep an eye on this to see how that translated content ends up performing over time. Note, the March core update officially completed this morning (3/27) so that content did well based on the update. I’ll update this post if there is anything new to add. GG

Generative AI is built on three key resources: people, compute and data. While companies invest heavily in the first two, they often use unlicensed creative work as training data without permission or payment — a practice that pits AI against the very creators it relies on. AI expert Ed Newton-Rex has a solution: licensing. He unpacks the dark side of today's AI models and outlines a plan to ensure that both AI companies and creators can thrive together. (Recorded at TEDAI San Francisco on October 22, 2024)

I’m currently listening to add it up by icewear vezzo. [MEDIA=spotify]track:3q8qKQnBAy5JobqeDjwoOy[/MEDIA]

What have been some of your biggest community wins? These can include days with new records for daily logins, a high number of new threads/posts, or days with significant traffic. However, these wins can be anything you’d consider a success for your community. What have been some of your community’s biggest wins lately?

You can scale your forum by bringing on more staff members and upgrading your server when it’s needed.

You can’t attract younger and older members just like that. You have to build your communities’ foundation and just focus on building it. Forums are for everyone. It’s not necessarily a good idea to focus on age groups as you should aim to attract everyone.

I find quora and Reddit(askreddit) to be a good avenue to find new topic ideas when I’m lacking new content ideas. There’s a lot of content that’s available on both platforms that can be spun and turned into your own threads. Some of them are even great for discussions. I also keep notes where I have a lot of topics that I save for a rainy day when I’m experiencing a writer’s block of some sort.

VBulletin was one of my favorite forum softwares back in the day, however, it went downhill fast after Kier left & formed Xenforo. VBulletin 1, 2, and 3 was awesome.

AI can be used to help with keyword research and semantic seo. It’s great to use it for this. It’ll also help you find the proper keywords that’ll maximize your seo results as well.