Shawn Gossman

This is a really cool-looking feature!

Welcome to our community!

Welcome to a great admin forum! :)

I think it's a good way to build true loyalty in the community. It's something more of us should practice. I mean, consider this: Most of us (admins of our forums) are logging in and replying to all or at least most posts to help engage them, right? What's going to hurt keeping a discussion going with members in PM, as well? It's the same work as it takes to respond to a post at the end of the day.

Looks cool. Fun fact: I live in the official hometown of Superman, Metropolis, Illinois. It's not a very big city, either, but we have the statue and the world-famous museum and the annual Superman Fest. I live out of town way out in the country but I have a Metro address.

I remember when Open Diary and Live Journal were around. Those were kinds of social media. Maybe Friendster, too? I may have just played with the ones listed above. MySpace was one I got into more. And My Year Book. MySpace was cool because you could add HTML and really customize things. But the spam was INSANE!

The editor looks interesting. Hope to see more features added, but wouldn't expect too many until XenForo 3.0 is released. Then, my expectations would be a little wider. X.x = minor features X.0 = major features At least that's what I've always thought about versioning.

Great points [mention=1]Cedric[/mention] I've been asking myself this question for a while now concerning the community I get paid to manage on Copyblogger. A friend of mine who helped write a big paid newsletter now owned by HubSpot told me that when he did a paid community, he would make sure he wrote one really interesting discussion a day to keep everyone occupied for the day. I think if we do just that, it would help during slower periods. It's best to research these topics and create a content calendar so that you have a list of them to post. With a forum, we want to create many of these but even just one can help keep the community active on a daily basis.

Welcome to the community :)

I can function on 6 hours of sleep, but staying up until 2? I can't remember the last time I did that it's been so long ago LOL

As a forum owner visiting a forum that doesn't belong to you, what are some annoying things about other forums or pet peeves that you have? Do you give feedback about these things to the forum owner, or do you keep it to yourself?

Ah, I see. I'd just share the information and say I was reporting suspicious activity. I don't really think they can do much to the reporting party unless the report was falsified.

Never tried it back when I smoked. I smoked a lot of different kinds of weed, though, before it was illegal. Now I don't do anything but coffee and hot tea, LOL.

Some of the, yes. Some of them, no. Typically I do for my blogs, not so much my forums. You have to go where your audience is, as others have mentioned. It helps if you research first and look around to see how active your audience is on various popular social media platforms. All my Hiking with Shawn audience (mainly local, regional, and Chicago) are mainly on Facebook and Instagram. All my blogging audience for Serious Bloggers are on X and LinkedIn. You also want to look at the benefits of the social platform based on what you want from it. I want to convert my social audience into subscribers of my newsletter and readers of my blog, so Facebook and IG are good for that. TikTok is designed to keep people on the platform, constantly swiping from video to video. I stay away from it because that's for brands that want to exclusively work from TikTok as their main product. I've had a lot of good experiences with YT and FB. Content scaling and engagement are my recommendations. Post at least once a day, more a day, if you can. Make sure it's interesting and value-packed high quality content. Engage more than you post. Engage as much as you can. Engage with people you want to follow you and engage with their followers. Be seen as being value-packed and helpful. My Facebook page is about to hit 22,000 followers. I engage so much that FB pays me a bonus check every month. It's usually around $500, but sometimes it's right under $2,000. My Facebook group has around 47,000 members.

It was when everyone kept getting that bad batch online. I think it was because people were getting it from countries with no QA requirements.

I've never been able to do that again. LOL. Nowadays, 11:00 PM and I'm dead tired lol Haven't stayed up to celebrate the new year for quite a few years!

If they're faking it, they deserve to get in trouble. There are a lot of people out there that need help, that really need help. Someone faking suicidal tendencies, IMO, is like someone pranking an emergency hotline (like 911 here in the States).

Voted :)

That's why I typically am the only admin. I'd be happy to make a Community Manager (lead moderator) or something like that as a higher position. Still, I shy away from giving anyone else full admin authority over a community that I pay for.

I've done some digging and used the heck out of the way back machine. :D I've had a few admin forums over the years. ForumSeed.com in 2007. AdminQuest.com in 2008. I wonder if I merged those two. I really can't remember. Is that a sign of old age?!?!? I had a website called Kruzzen once. I tried to make it like MSN or Yahoo with a network of websites like a dating site (using osDate by TuFat - anyone remember that one) and others. I had a general forum on it called All Topics. I think it was very short-lived. I've had so many forums that I can't remember what all I've had.

I've always enjoyed doing them because I work hard to make really good ones, even if the exchanger doesn't do good ones in return. I've always had a reputation for being a good post exchanger, and I take pride in that. :)

The only ones I've had were from LSD and mushrooms back when I was a teenager, LOL. Well, I take that back... When I was a coal miner, I was up once for 4 days straight with not even a minute of sleep. I was driving home at 3:00 AM and kept seeing shadows of people running down the interstate. I'm sure that was from lack of sleep. I used to have insomnia really bad. Now I lay in bed, turn over, and I'm out!

If you're too lazy to work on getting real members, then you're probably going to be too lazy to make your fake members look convincing. If they are convincing, you might need a government check and a hospital visit. :P

That's too bad! I love text-based games. There used to be one called Lord or something like that. And then they made another and it had graphics but really cheap one but it was still awesome!

Back when I vaped (glad I eventually quit right before everyone started dying from it), I had VapingForum.com, and my community got pretty active on it. I sold it to another person, and they converted it to a different software and kept it going for a short time, and then it completely disappeared. I always wondered why that happened. Even now, vaping is still a thing.