Ravenfreak

I personally would love to start from scratch. There's nothing wrong with purchasing a well established forum, but something about building my own community from the ground up just feels more rewarding.

Cool another promotional forum! I'll definitely be joining soon, I like the name as well! Looks great so far!

I usually don't allow members to delete their posts, if they want a thread or post deleted they just report the post and I delete it myself. I'm afraid members might abuse the delete button if they're allowed to delete their own posts.

I've only used shared hosting, I don't have the funds to purchase a good VPS and I would need to actually learn how to manage things myself because self managing would be cheaper and honestly more fun in some cases.

I've never been in a fight with any of my internet friends. I have been in a fight with my best friend growing up a few times but we got over it and became friends again multiple times.

I've used Facebook mainly to promote my websites but in the past I've used Twitter and recently used Bluesky to promote Thee Zone after the TikTok ban happened. I need to promote more I think on Bluesky, I've also tried promoting on Reddit a little bit after asking permission from mods and got quite a few members on Gex Forums that way.

My goal for this year is to work on my backlog of games. I'm currently playing through Rayman 2 The Great Escape, I've had it in my collection for years and never played it much. I went ahead and used Wheel Decide to figure out which console I was going to tackle first and it picked PS1. Then I went ahead and listed what games I seen on my shelf that I never played. I plan on also working on my Youtube channel more consistently and focus on my forums more. Also move everything over from Ionos to Hostinger. This will save me some money in the long run.

Welcome to the content team [mention=202]King Belieal[/mention] I look forward to working alongside you!

Let's just hope that this doesn't happen. Bluesky continues to keep growing every day. Also it's not as Left leaning like people think it is, you can control what you want to see and block content you don't want to see on your feed unlike other platforms. I like it better than Mastodon too, since it's pretty much just one centralized platform so it's easy to sign up and log in.

Congratulations on your promotion [mention=545]Matthew[/mention]!

I thought you were using Jcink at first because of the theme! xD Then I realized it was phpBB! It's always great to see another webmaster/promotional forum pop up! You've got some good people helping you out on the forum too.

Thankfully I've never experienced this on any community that I've joined. I feel that it was more common to come across a bad community manager in the past when forums were more popular. I have seen other forums suffer from lack of staff being available however. As soon as the admins stopped logging in to take care of the forum, other people tried to reach out elsewhere to get them to come back but it fell on deaf ears.

If she's worried that the US government is going to take down the forum and if you get things squared away I highly recommend using offshore hosting. People think it's bad because people use it for DMCA ignoring sites, but if it's hosted offshore there's literally nothing the US government can do about it. Just some food for thought. I hope you can figure things out, there's plenty of people here who have moved websites from one host to another, I'm one of those people btw.

I'm a bit worried but not too much. I understand that many people are stuck on social media, and it's hard to compete against that. Even Discord is taking away activity from forums, despite being different. I used to get upset when people wouldn't join my forums, but now I kind of came to accept that unless I'm offering something people can't get anywhere else I probably won't have many new registrations. One forum I do own has 75 members on it and that's quite a bit for a forum.

I've finished my part.

Throughout the years I've used MyBB, phpBB3, SMF, Woltlab, Invision, Xenforo, Zetaboards, InvisionFree, Jcink, BraveNet, FluxBB, PunBB, XMB and I tried Flarum a little bit. I'm currently using ForumSpark on a test board and I'm really liking this free hosting, it's like Zetaboards like mentioned in the thread. Of course this wasn't on the same forum, these were all different forums I've had throughout the years and honestly a lot of them were for testing purposes because I wanted to try out different forum software. I'm currently using SMF, Woltlab and soon vBulletin for another forum once it gets migrated over. I switched from Xenforo to Woltlab because I didn't like the direction the staff were taking with the software at the time. They were taking too long for updates. The forum that will be hosted on vBulletin's cloud servers I felt needed more than what phpBB offers so that's why I switched plus they had a sale going on at the time.

I didn't know you needed a license to operate a ham radio? I'm guessing it's for FCC regulations right? I never really was interested in the hobby, I bet it was more fun back in the day when the internet didn't exist to talk via ham radio.

Good luck to all who apply!

I usually wait a bit before promoting members to staff. I wait and see who's the most active and if they have asked to be staff in the past. If they asked, I wouldn't promote them since I have it stated in my rules that if you ask to be staff you will not be promoted. It just seems rude to me. I also see if the member has any infractions and if they do, I wouldn't promote them either.

Part of me has always wanted to make a forum for one of my favorite music artist named Dan Mason, but I feel like it wouldn't be worth it since he's got a Discord server for people who support him and fans too. I just don't think it would really take off.

I'll do the last 10 posts!

I'd probably be playing a lot of video games like I did when I was younger during my spare time. Still I love forums and I'm glad I got into them.

I try to pay for my hosting annually rather than monthly these days. I used to pay monthly because it's what I could afford at the time.

I think it depends on the niche of the forum, but if it was a gaming forum I was part of that did a contest I would like to win digital gift cards for either Xbox, Playstation or Steam. Nothing too big, a $10 one would be fine.

I filmed a unboxing video, I'll need to edit it whenever I get the time.