Shawn Gossman

Welcome to the forum :)

Great forum. I hear the moderator is an alright dude, too! :D

I couldn't do it. It's not ethical. It's lying. It's defrauding your members. I also feel like if you do it, get caught, and your reputation is ruined, you deserve everything you get. I'd rather just be me!

I prefer organic growth. :) People find the community on their own, like it, and join as normal members who want to be a part of it. Other than that: I do enjoy post-exchanging as long as the exchanger posts in the main areas rather than just the off-topic section. Social media has helped me in some communities. All my outdoor-related ones have had very successful results using my social networking connections. However, I've built a brand and a community on social to get that benefit. It's important to have multiple forms of marketing streams just as much as people need to have multiple streams of income if you want to make real money online. You have a better chance at meeting your goals this way.

And for the $180 that it is, that's for the life of vb6. No annual renewal for that version!

Howdy everyone, My name is Shawn and I'm new to the place. I love being social and I love forums, so this was a great choice for me! A bit about me: I'm 40, a male, and I live in Southern Illinois, USA. I'm married, got step kids, and cats. I love the outdoors! Hiking, camping, cycling, caving, kayaking -- you name it! I'm outside every chance I get. I also love blogging, forums, and socializing with others online. I work in investigations and have a graduate degree concentrating in counterintelligence and anti-terrorism. That sums me up! I look forward to chatting with you all! :)

Our local paper The Southern pay gates everything on their website. Now we have a few "alternative" news groups popping up. It's free news and they report on stuff no one else will. That's the future.

I've been following it. It's getting strange. My worry is this - could you imagine a world without the downloadable WP software and only a paid SaaS version? That's what online communities are turning into. People would rather pay Circle or Mighty Networks $100 a month to host on their cloud rather than install XF or VB on their own server. It's nice until you can't pay, and then you simply lose it. Rented space.

Just going back and researching, there was a lot that I didn't mention above LOL.

If I can add a 5th - create a lead magnet. I have a newsletter that I poorly advertised on my blog. It got about 60 subscribers over three years. Then, I created a lead magnet and promoted in a little more. Within a year, it went from 60 to 3,000 subscribers. Make sure the lead magnet is worth joining for. Sometimes, your forum content and engagement bait can be a lead magnet all in itself. But for example, if Administrata created a free eBook on how to "monetize a forum" and offered it to people who joined (and have already joined), it will probably increase membership. Your lead magnet should address pain points.

Picked me up a license of vBulletin 6. Last time I used VB was when 3.8 was in, a LONG time ago, lol. It's different. Lots of settings. They call everything channels, whereas XF calls everything nodes. So far, I like it. I don't like it as much or more than XenForo, but I'm not unhappy with my purchase. Features include a forum of course, user blogs, articles, and social groups. Definitely fully-featured. Is anyone else trying vBulletin 6 at all?

I don't. If you've been banned from one of my communities, then you'd done something really bad. I don't like banning if we can work it out. But if I am forced to, then I don't want you on my forum.

My Bike Southern Illinois forum is specific to southern Illinois cyclists. As a local forum, I mainly target a local audience. I'm marking with a local effort including using brochures offline that people can grab at local bike shops. I cold contact local cyclists and ask them to join, most of them know or know of me. I focus on local SEO. I promote on social and Strava in local groups.

Another Admin Forum is a forum for forum owners to discuss all topics associated with creating, managing, promoting, and monetizing a discussion forum. Everyone is welcome including other admin forums. https://www.anotheradminforum.com/

Facebook has been the best for me. I get 500K visits a month. I earn performance bonuses now. My strategy: Post organic content 5 times a day, every day including text posts, photos, and videos. I schedule it a week at a time. 19K followers on my page. I didn't add my big group to the 40K... that has 46K members on it alone. It's great but it's still sketchy because it's rented space. My goal is to keep growing my mailing list.

I love admin forums. I'll try to join every one of them I can :) I get it, too. AAF was my baby and now I have a chance to revive it. So, that's what I'm doing :)

No. Listen, that sort of aggression is what has caused a lot of forum industry and genre to die like it is. Instead of being jealous or hating on different software, we should embrace forums otherwise we'll kill it all off in the end. I'm fine joining any forum using any software.

Let me think about it... I'm old now... LOL From 2000 to present: First forum was a goth forum. Don't laugh. I used to be goth as a teen LOL. It used PhpBB1 and I then restarted it with PhpBB2. It didn't last long. I was on dialup back then! When ProBoards first started, I made a forum there about WebTV, LOL. I had a general forum using PhpBB2 plugged into Php-Nuke. Anyone remember that? It was awesome! I've had many weather-related forums: WeatherBB, Skywarn Forum, Storm Chaser Forum - used MyBB, vBulletiin, and XenForo for those. I started AAF 1.0 on SMF and eventually went to IPB and then XF. I had my Skywarn Forum on vBulletin 3.X series. Now I have 4 and working on 5th. 1. Another Admin Forum (2.0) 2. Bike Southern Illinois 3. Blogging Collective 4. The Hiking Forum WIP-5: Off Topic Forum which is going to be on vBulletin 6 because I want to try it out LOL

I typically use my established communities and social media profiles to get the first membership on my communities. Some have to start from scratch. I already had around 20 members waiting to join before I launched my biking community. It's local so the local people I ride with were ready to be a part of it. I'm a hiking influencer on social media. I have around 40,000 followers combined from YT, FB, IG, X, and Threads. So, when I launched my hiking forum, I started promoting it to that crowd. It's still new and growing but I'll be promoting it on my 3,000+ subscriber newsletter soon and hope that helps me grow it as well. My admin and blogging forum have pretty much had to start from scratch which is fine with me. :)

Howdy folks, Shawn here. Long time forum owner (over 20 years). I run around 4 forums but getting ready to start my 5th one. I run them in alignment with my passions, not so much for business. I've ran some big forums. Skywarn Forum was my biggest, even bought out my competition, have over 10K members. It eventually crashed and I was not able to recover it. Sad but lessons learned. Owned a forum called Another Admin Forum which might be where some of you remember me from. I just recently restarted that forum and am excited about it. I'm heavily involved in online community. I'm even a paid community manager from a well-known site called Copyblogger. I also do social communities. I have several Facebook groups with more than 2K members on each and a really big one with 46K members. I love communities and forums and I love to help others with theirs. Other than that, I'm 40 years old, male, and I'm from southern IL. Thanks for having me!

Shawn here. I'm new to the forum. I'm 38 years old, male, and I live in the United States. I'm big into the outdoors. I love hiking, biking, and camping. I also live video and photography. And I'm a nerd too. Computing and stuff like that is something I enjoy :) Thanks for having me!