Shawn Gossman

I call it Charter Membership...You might call it Founding Member or something like that. These are the first XX amount of members on your forum that are always active and engaging. It may not be all the first but more the first ones who remain active. Do you do anything special for these members at all? I always like to award 10 members with this and give them premium membership for life as the benefit. How about you all?

Welcome to the community!! :)

Used to be. I'm married now and life couldn't be better. When I was a loner, I thought that was the life, but I was very lonely, and a void was with me. I drank too much, got upset too easily, and wasn't good at being a friend to people back when I was lonely. Now I couldn't be happier. The thought of being alone again is the only think that makes me feel slightly depressed.

You got forums in your blood!

It depends. I have a Facebook group with over 45,000 members on it. I can take a few days break from it, and it does fine. If I did that on any of my forums, I think I'd come back to a dead forum. Maybe once a forum becoming a big board or very active, sure.

But if you get caught doing it, it could impact your reputation. I think doing a post-exchange is better than that. At least with that, it's a real person.

Nice. I started one for AAF and launched Nov 1 as well. I'm just trying to keep it very simple. Can't wait to participate in yours :)

Definitely important to mix passion with strategy. If you want something out of it at least - be it profit or just a nice loving community. The same goes with anything else you do online: Blogging, social media influencing, eCommerce, etc. If people integrate passion and strategy into their business and branding, success is designed to follow. Great resource :)

I finally get to create them how they should be created. I used to run a lot of forums back in the old days. I left it for health reasons. When I came back, I learned from that experience and mitigated the mistakes I made before. Of course, we're only human. We make mistakes regardless. I think experience goes a long way!

What's crazy about that is that it's the oldest failure in the book! You have to keep posting to keep the interest up. I have a group on Facebook that has 46K members. It's extremely active. But I notice if the other staff members or I aren't that active, activity declines. When we are active, hundreds of posts a day. I schedule my posts on there, some themed ones, to help keep it active. With a forum, it's even more important. Everyone is on social media; hardly anyone is on YOUR forum unless they join because of something they like. If they don't see an active admin, I bet they pass on joining. If you can't be active on your own forum - you might consider a different type of website.

Right now, I'm focusing on building a loyal community of friends and networking as the incentive rather than a feature. Benefits over features.

This looks great! It's simple but modern! Keep updating us with more changes you make. You have an opportunity to get into the free forum world and potentially outdo the competition if you play your cards right.

It's the best way the only way to build a true community.

I think many of the bigger forums failed because they (admins) put their needs first. Put your members first. Whether you're in it to get paid or not, your members are your customers, and you should put their needs first. The more you do that, the more invested they will become in your community.

I try to make a few new topics a day. On my niche forums, it's easy because I'm passionate about it. On my general/off-topic forum, it's a bit harder. Small talk isn't my best suit, LOL.

I'm a big nerd. Computers, tech, surveillance cameras, blogging, copywriting, forums = love them!!! BUT! I'm an even bigger outdoorsman. Hiking, biking, backpacking, caving, kayaking, camping = every chance I get!

It must be doing well. I earn performance bonuses from them for my hiking/outdoor brand. Some of the bonuses are big - over $1K a month. I have 20K followers on my page and 46K members on my group.

I'm a surveillance operator. I monitor surveillance cameras for violations and cheating, maintain the cameras and switches powering them, conduct investigations for the law enforcement operations of the property, and watch for regulatory violations. This is in the casino sector.

I've used DreamHost for over 15 years. I use it for my domain registration and my VPS.

I say go for it. People like it :)

Welcome to a great community! :)

phpBB1 but not for very long. I might had use a script from Bravenet before that but I can't remember that far back - im old now. phpBB2 was really the main software I used for a forum for a few years. That and Php-Nuke which used phpBB2. Oh those were the days!

I never did this sort of thing. I suppose if one of my communities got very large and a lot of inactive posts being archived could help with resource consumption levels, I'd entertain the idea of it.

I remember the original BBS. The ones that worked using dialups networks. Never did it myself though. When I started making forums, phpBB1 was available. Then phpBB2 came along and it was amazing... until you added plugins to it, then it took hours to add a simple plugin because it was all by hand. Eventually went to vBulletin 3.X series. After vb4 and all the drama that came with that, I moved onto other free ones like MyBB and SMF. Got on the XenForo bandwagon from the start and that's mainly what I use now. I do have a vb6 forum though and it's kind of neat! I'm also using MyBB, SMF, and phpBB3 as well. I want to get used to all the platforms available! Well, most. Invision is a bit expensive. Before forums, I was on WebTV and then my first PC (dialup days), I made a lot of custom HTML static sites. Now for websites, I'm all WordPress, baby!

Howdy Arantor! Always like seeing your name on a forum :D