fdk

I've joined in on this request, and will be starting shortly. I've signed up as Unlocked.

I am taking the third spot in this request. :)

I personally really dislike Discord, and it's so frustrating that I get so many people ask me to contact them there. I do have a Discord account, but I only use it on the Web App and only if there's no other means of communication. If I was running a forum at the moment, I definitely wouldn't be using or integrating Discord with it. I've seen several forums that I was very active at fall into the trap of trying to "grow" their forum by using Discord as an additional outlet and attempting to recruit through it. Inevitably it's always led to either outright closure of the forum, or a significant reduction in activity. Almost seems to be a death trap for forums to me.

Not sure if I've posted this one in this thread before, but what an incredible vocal performance...

Yes. When: [redacted] Where: [redacted] How: [redacted] You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence, if you do not mentioned, when questioned, something upon which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given as evidence. Pays to learn this ^^

Come on! You yourself posted a brilliant example of a phpBB site that nobody would ever know was phpBB: https://administrata.net/threads/do-you-tend-to-join-avoid-sites-that-use-a-certain-forum-software.103/page-4#post-4340 Did you have your coffee today? :P

This is an amazing example of what a good administrator can do. I'm still not sure if I quite believe it's phpBB! Edit: Epic fail, realised after I posted the meme that it does not work. xD

Oh my word, her voice....

I disagree. myBB can be adapted for mobile relatively easy, and I use several myBB forums that run absolutely fine on mobile. "Optimization" for mobile phones generally requires the admin to do a bit of work, and I don't think that's too much to expect, especially for a free software. This sums up my feelings pretty well. Nowadays, in comparison to other softwares, phpBB looks quite outdated. 15 years ago, phpBB was the forum software to beat imo, and it's simplicity (both user, and mod/admin wise) was it's number one selling point. Just as a footnote, I've come across some MyBB (and one phpBB) forums lately that you wouldn't know are using those softwares if you didn't look in the footer for the credits. Again, I go back to the forum admin - if you have a little technical knowledge, and some patience/time, these platforms offer great customization options for free.

The first forum I ran used phpBB2. It was so simple and easy to use, I do miss the days of basic forums like that. I also never noticed any sort of performance issues, even with on occasions thousands of hourly visitors. That forum launched in around 2007-08 or so, and closed in 2012-13 time. From then on, I tended to lean mainly towards MyBB, as the availability of themes, plugins and modifications was so much better than phpBB3. phpBB3 I also found unnecessarily complicated, and the fact they didn't offer a plugin/modification installer natively sucked. (with MyBB, you could install plugins and setup settings in a matter of 5 minutes, with phpBB3, a similar plugin setup could take an hour or more)

I didn't have lots of time to go through every site thoroughly, but from my quick visits and looks I've voted for 2TonWaffle to win. Good luck to everyone who has entered!

I like the sound of Option 2, maybe with the addition of one extra section of Tutorials & Guides for people to post guides on how to do certain things for people who don't have experience. (ie, how to register a domain/set nameservers, how to setup webmail accounts, etc etc) Glad to hear that you're all ears and willing to implement suggestions!

Hey, welcome to the site! I've not long signed up myself, it does seem like a great little community to put a few minutes into each day and watch it slowly grow over time. Glad you joined up aswell, and again, welcome!

Every forum I've ever been on has a "What are you listened to?" thread where people post YouTube links to what song they're listening to at that moment. This is Administrata's such thread, seeing as I didn't find one! I'll go first.

The mobile thing is definitely important for me. I'm back using a laptop now, but for a few years over lockdown and such I only browsed the internet using my phone. Any website that wasn't mobile-friendly quickly fell off my list of regularly visited websites, and that included a couple of the few forums I still did frequent, most of which were MyBB-powered. I always found MyBB enjoyable and user-friendly, and the extensive amount of plugins that were developed and supported for many years in some earlier releases of the software made it probably the best free package out there at the time, in my opinion.

The offer was close to 5 figures, which is a significant amount of money now to anyone, but to me as a teenager/young adult felt like life-changing money. Of course, it mostly got squandered, but it was a blast and a valuable life lesson at a relatively young age! The paid advertising did seem to drive a lot of traffic to the forum, but not so much in terms of active members. A fair amount signed up, but would make a single post or not even one and disappear. Maybe I should have worked harder on retention mechanisms - hindsight is a wonderful thing, though! I wouldn't write off paid advertising, even nowadays, but I would 100% want to completely optimise both my website and my advertising budget spend before I invested in that again.

I've not seen a new forum running MyBB since at least about 2015-16 or so, maybe even further back. There's still a few forums I know of that setup with MyBB and still run it to this day and are going strong, but they're all run by experienced webmasters who undoubtedly have thrown a lot of their own wisdom and knowledge into the codebase too. I'd be interested to see what they could do that would be so drastically different from what they currently are, while not just copying the premium software packages out there like XenForo.

I'd like to suggest a new section be added for general discussion around websites, development or projects. Currently there is a category specifically around "Community Empowerment", but judging from the descriptions on these sections it doesn't seem that threads related to non-community based websites would fit there. Just as an example, we're still Administrators if we're only running a handful of static page websites, or if we're running a simple WordPress blog. Let's have a more generalised section for talk about websites, development, coding, hosting providers, and so on. Just an idea, interested to hear anyone else's thoughts.

I wouldn't say I have a "favourite" as such, I used to use GoDaddy when I was younger and run my websites. I've registered a couple of domain names lately for upcoming projects with Names.co.uk, simply because it was high in the Google listings and they had a special offer for cheap registration fees. I only need to buy the domains and set the nameservers, I don't bother with any other services domain providers provide as they're generally sub-par and overpriced.

I've not run a forum or another community-focused website for around 10 years, but for me the thing that made me struggle a lot was the effort required to advertise. I run a semi-successful football (or soccer, if you're American) forum for around 3 years as a teenager. At it's height it had 2,000 posts made daily (upto 4,000 at the weekends) and 250 or so daily active users, but it always felt like we were just on the cusp of becoming a really big community. It was still great with what we had, but there were quiet periods sometimes throughout the day, and new member retention wasn't as high as I'd have liked it to be. The upside to it not exploding was that the forum was generally run very well and there were very rarely major problems, with only 2 volunteer Moderators working alongside myself, and if I recall in 3 years we issued perhaps 50 "official" warnings and maybe 10 bans. Another upside of it being a relatively modest-sized community was that most members knew each other, or at least knew of each other, so when one of their teams lost and they were angry there was generally someone around who'd tell them if they're in danger of going too far. It always felt like a bit of a chore to me trying to advertise, because a lot of websites of a similar niche disallowed the advertising of similar websites, and social media was not as much of a presence back then as it is now. I found that paid advertising did bring some additional traffic, and a handful of members, but having spent our donations for 3 month period of around £500 on advertising and only getting perhaps 20 new active members out of it, I decided not to continue. I had some success with implementing a referral system, but then struggled with incentivising members to refer others. In the end, I got made an offer for the forum that I couldn't refuse, and unfortunately for some reason the new owner literally decided to just let the forum die. It was a great shame because I put so many years of hard work and effort into it (not that I didn't get rewarded), but it was a shame for everything to just essentially disappear. So yeah, for me, having to find places to advertise is one thing I definitely don't miss having to do!

I have a few ideas for just some basic information websites around some specific issues in my local area. I also have a longer-term plan to develop a small network of websites of various niches (maybe a blog, maybe an insurance info website, etc) with the ultimate goal of monetising them via advertising. Super long-term, I am also (slowly) working on building a text-based browser game, more of a personal project than anything else.

Found the website through Forum Promotion.

Hello everyone, fdk1971 here. Found this and thought it might be a helpful resource to be a part of as I'm planning to launch some websites late this year/in early 2025. Good to be here with you all.