fdk

Back 10-15 years ago when forums were somewhat more popular than they are now and I was starting out, I ran a few "posting competitions". Inevitably, I experienced some of the problems many admins will experience when running such competitions - spam & low quality posters. Especially as the prizes were significant. When experimenting with novel ideas to decrease "direct" competition and so hopefully result in fewer "rubbish" posts overall, I decided to change the competition format to be a goal-based community system, where users posting would earn "points" towards the community goal, which raised the overall prize fund to be distributed from the competition. Members could only earn "points" for their first 10 posts a day, and while I promised there was a "super secret" formula behind the scenes working out how many points to award, there wasn't, it was simply based on the section of the forum being posted in to determine the points - the more relevant to the main topic of the forum (and so generally (at least hopefully!) a better quality post), the more points awarded. This approach, whilst taking a bit of setting up and refining, eliminated for the most part all of the problems I had with individuals trying to "game" or cheat the system, and overall, it resulted in what I perceived to be better community cohesion and a real sense of working together towards the goals, which massively increased the activity on the forums I ran these sorts of competitions on.

I just cast my vote for this month and decided to pick mindsConnected this time around. Looks like a few others disagree with me, but there's still time for all of our community to have their say! Please go right ahead and vote in the poll. :)

My most successful forum was monetized really well at it's most successful, but mainly through premium usergroup upgrades/premium currency purchases rather than advertising. We had a significant advertising income, firstly through Google AdSense but then as we grew we found individual advertisers who paid for permanent spots. Still, our advertising income was probably only around 20% of our total income, with almost all the rest coming exclusively from the premium currency purchases. :)

Currently in the process of rewatching some early episodes of The Walking Dead... I've seen upto around season five or so, but thought before going through watching all the rest I should start from the beginning to refresh my memory, as it's been many, many years since I watched the first few series... loving it all over again at the moment, I'm immersed!

Thank you for choosing the Administrata Content Order Service! We’re excited to help you grow and enhance your community. Below is the current progress on your content package: Progress Update: Threads: 5/5 Posts: 20/20 Formal Threads/Guidelines: N/A. fdk: 4/4 Posts Scorpion: 5/5 Threads, 16/16 Posts Estimated Completion Date: We expect your package to be fully completed by April 3rd, 2025. Got Questions? If you have any questions or additional details you'd like to share, feel free to reply to this thread or message our team directly. We’re here to help! We’d Love Your Feedback! Once your order is complete, we’d appreciate it if you could share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue to support admins like you

Your account has been successfully charged! (In case this was a free gift/prize, no deduction was made) We’ve deducted the Administrata Credits for your order. Thank you for choosing the Administrata Content Bundle Service—we appreciate your trust in us! We’d Love Your Feedback! We hope you’re satisfied with your order! If you have a moment, please share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue supporting admins like you! Got Questions? If you have any questions or concerns about this charge or your order, feel free to reply to this thread or contact our team directly. We’re here to help!

Your order has now been completed! Thank you for using the Administrata Content Service. The credits for this order will be deducted from your account shortly. We’d Love Your Feedback! We hope you’re satisfied with your order! Once you’ve had a chance to review the completed package, we’d appreciate it if you could share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue supporting admins like you! Got Questions? If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reply to this thread or contact our team directly. We’re here to help!

I do struggle a bit with the idea that there's "no price" on any website, especially one as "small" (in relative scale) as a forum. I mean, seriously - if you were offered $1m or even $10m for your forum, which you could then use to invest in building & significantly advertising a new project... duh?! I sold my biggest forum (for a significant chunk of change, at least to a teenager!) but I definitely regret it. I got a decent amount of money for it at the time, which allowed me to buy a few things and have a few experiences a lot of teenagers don't get, so I was thankful for it in that respect - but man, if I hadn't gone through with the sale I have no doubt I'd still own that community today and it'd be a thriving family business. Live and learn, as they say!

I began my first ever forum on a free hosting service - mind you, I was about 11-12 at the time. It quickly became obvious to me, even at that young age, that if I ever had a successful forum, I would 100% want my own hosting and own domain name - free forum hosting is usually somewhat insecure, and as you rightly said, you don't "own" the content/site if you check the T&Cs in many cases. Thankfully I'd migrated to my own hosting package before one of my forums took off and became popular... had it somehow happened for me on a free-forum hosting site, God knows what the experience would've been... I'm willing to bet nowhere near as enjoyable as ultimately it was! :)

I personally have never understood what's supposed to be any good about any of the Star Wars films... and I know I'm gonna get some hate for that lol! :ROFLMAO: I watched about 30 mins of the first Star Wars once and just remember thinking "what?"... never watched anymore. People often don't believe me when I tell them I've never seen the movies and have no idea what they're talking about.

I never watched Game of Thrones when it was originally on, but it's always been something multiple people have recommended to me so I finally went ahead and watched it a few weeks ago. I was warned that I'd be really disappointed by the ending, and of course, I was extremely frustrated! I started trying to watch House of the Dragon immediately after, I got about 3-4 episodes in but I just couldn't get along with it. I'll probably try to revisit watching it at some point, but after the disappointing ending to GoT, maybe I just wasn't quite ready yet. :LOL:

Your account has been successfully charged! We’ve deducted the Administrata Credits for your order. Thank you for choosing the Administrata Content Bundle Service—we appreciate your trust in us! We’d Love Your Feedback! We hope you’re satisfied with your order! If you have a moment, please share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue supporting admins like you! Got Questions? If you have any questions or concerns about this charge or your order, feel free to reply to this thread or contact our team directly. We’re here to help!

Your order has now been completed! Thank you for using the Administrata Content Service. The credits for this order will be deducted from your account shortly. We’d Love Your Feedback! We hope you’re satisfied with your order! Once you’ve had a chance to review the completed package, we’d appreciate it if you could share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue supporting admins like you! Got Questions? If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to reply to this thread or contact our team directly. We’re here to help!

This feels like a natural place for me to end this order - I am 3 posts and 2 threads short of the total amount, however I cannot find a place to post that would feel natural and I don't want to make posts for the sake of posting that may not seem genuine. In recognition of the fact this order took longer than we would have expected and that we had a few problems along the way, I have applied a slightly cheaper price to the package that we would ordinarily charge. The deduction for this package will be 4,000 Credits. Thanks!

Great updates, I love the new layout of the forum sections and the additions of a few new sections which are always eventually needed on a growing community such as Administrata. :) I've switched back to the original theme just for the time being, mainly because I like it so much and find change difficult at times, but I sincerely promise to revisit the new theme again in a week or two. I'm sure by that time it'll be even better too as any small issues will have been ironed out. Here's to hoping that these changes help to spark Administrata to life just a little more - we've had a great few months recently, but more growth for our great community is always welcome!

I'll enter on behalf of the charity I work for (which I'll keep private for now, but happily share with the staff/design team), who may soon need a new infographic produced. Awesome giveaway, [mention=36]BRANSOL[/mention]'s work is fantastic from previous viewing! :)

Good evening & happy Friday evening to all Administratans! :D

Now this is a real old-school nostalgic view of the world that I absolutely love and identify with to a massive extent, despite being just a few years younger. Rayman 2, by the way, was the absolute bomb! :D

Hey [mention=604]rumsfo[/mention], welcome to Administrata, we're glad you found us! :) Please take the time to let us know how you found the site and I hope you enjoy everything we have to offer here.

If you really don't want to walk away (which I get, the community might be relatively large and have useful content there), then arrange a proper discussion with the owner about being given some limited admin permissions. Reassure him that you're fine with him limiting those permissions to not allow you to do anything harmful, but tell him that it's clear he doesn't have the time to dedicate to the forum and you'd really appreciate the opportunity of helping out and clearing the place up. If you've already been doing a good job of keeping things ticking over with the limited moderator permissions you already have, he might just be willing to offer that extra bit of trust. Ultimately, I do feel that what Al specifically mentioned should be your realistic option - if the current owner wants a six-figure price tag, I'm guessing the community is either huge, or is in a niche that has huge potential for advertising and associated income - if you have the time on your hands to take on such a site, then you almost definitely have the time on your hands to have a real crack at doing your own forum in the same niche, and attempting to migrate over the members that are also disillusioned with the inattention paid to the current forum... you'll find plenty of resources, advice and support here at Administrata too to help you along the journey. :)

I've never had any of my own admin/mod accounts compromised, but on one of my forums I did once have one of my Moderator's accounts compromised and it resulted in some pretty hefty damage, with a few hundreds threads and a couple thousand posts being deleted by the malicious party, and several users banned or limited, before the damage was able to be stopped. Ultimately, I had to perform a rollback to around an eight hour old backup, which resulted in the loss of 500-something posts and a bit of manual work to fix things that had occurred on the site. Luckily it wasn't too onerous, and the Moderator was heavily apologetic and received advice on password security. We also implemented 2FA for staff (2FA was in its relative infancy at this point, too) at this point, which meant we never had any further issues in the future.

Have you ever experienced a situation whereby a member has disclosed or mentioned a disability to you and requested a change or modification to your site to help support them to navigate or access it? It's probably not well known that it's thought that upto 10% of regular internet users have some sort of disability that affects their ability to navigate some websites, so as admins we're potentially inadvertently excluding a lot of people from accessing our sites simply as we don't realise this section of our demographic sometimes requires extra support in accessing our sites. I've been leading on a project at work lately to update our website to be compatible with screen readers, devices that "intelligently" read information from a website to blind people in a way that makes it easier for them to navigate the web. Similarly, we are piloting features that allow automatic AI BSL (British Sign Language) interpreters to appear alongside our video content for deaf users. Does anyone else have any experience of these issues on their own forums or communities, or can you think of times you've made adjustments or changed things to be more "friendly" towards those with disabilities?

Please make sure if you're a member over at FP you vote for Administrata in it's battles! Let's get our great little community a bit more exposure and continue our journey of growth. :)

Thank you for choosing the Administrata Content Order Service! We’re excited to help you grow and enhance your community. Below is the current progress on your content package: Progress Update: Threads: 20/20 Posts: 80/80 Formal Threads/Guidelines: Content to be spread out in the main forums. Creativity talk, gaming discussion and virtual pets. Some posts are fine in the general as well (please no more than 20% team). Scorpion: 5/5 Threads, 20/20 Posts Nomad: 5/5 Threads, 20/20 Posts Flower: 5/5 Threads, 20/20 Posts Uptrendfinancialsignal: 5/5 Threads, 20/20 Posts Estimated Completion Date: We expect your package to be fully completed by April 2, 2025. Got Questions? If you have any questions or additional details you'd like to share, feel free to reply to this thread or message our team directly. We’re here to help! We’d Love Your Feedback! Once your order is complete, we’d appreciate it if you could share your experience with our service. Your feedback helps us improve and continue to support admins like you