fdk

The security of having a job works for me. Sure, I've always wanted to run my own business, and always thought I'd make it a success - but it would also require significant time and money investment, and ultimately, any business venture comes with some sort of risk attached. And that risk will always outweigh the risk of my (relatively) stable job.

Welcome to Administrata [mention=579]Magpieroband[/mention], it's a pleasure to have you on board and I really hope you enjoy all of the excellent resources and discussions we have available here. :)

Your account has been successfully charged! (If this was a free/gift order, 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!

Welcome to Administrata [mention=578]Allipotal[/mention], it's great to have you on board. :) I really hope you enjoy the forum and all the resources and discussions we have available here!

There's got to be some regular activity that's filling up another section, or is generic enough topic to need it's own section as demand/activity increases for me to consider adding a new section/forum. Primarily because, as [mention=98]InMyOpinion[/mention] mentioned, I hate to see an empty sub-forum and just think it detracts from the look of a site, especially to members who might judge activity based on "latest post" times etc. I personally like to have as few individual forums/sections as possible... sub-forums are slightly different, and I'm a bit more liberal with those when creating the branch/structure of a forum, but for the above reason mainly I stick to as few sections/forums as possible.

Hey [mention=571]Timelord_[/mention], I already welcomed you in another area of the forum but thought I'd post here in your intro thread too. A big welcome to Administrata and it's great to see that you've become an active contributor to the community already, I'm really looking forward to getting to know you and discuss things with you more. :) Enjoy the forum! fdk

Welcome to Administrata [mention=583]Fleetdispute[/mention], I really hope you enjoy reading all the awesome resources we have available. :) Do let us know if you need any help or have any questions about how anything on Administrata works!

How do you deal with feedback, whether it's on your forum or posted externally (perhaps a review on a topsite or on another forum thread), that is potentially rude or insensitive about your community, or individual staff members/yourself? Are you the kind of admin to try and post a defence against such negative feedback, or would you consider deleting such threads (if on your own forum) if they crossed a line? How far, in your mind, is that line? Just interested to hear from other admins how you deal with potentially rude/inflammatory feedback you may receive from time to time.

I really like the default phpBB3 theme. It's old-school, simple, clean and user-friendly. Everything is easily visible and "makes sense" to be placed where it is. I was also quite a fan of the default SMF theme the first time I came across an SMF forum using one many years ago, but haven't seen it in a long while since, so cant remember if that's just bad memory on my part or if it was genuinely sleek.

Hey [mention=576]Collectreport[/mention] a big welcome to Administrata and we're glad you found us! Hope to see you around the community. :)

A big welcome to Administrata [uSER=573]@TulleTweed&Co[/uSER] and it's great to have you on board. :) I really hope you enjoy the community and all the resources we have available here, and I hope to see you around and offering your advice when you feel able to, we all have things to learn and valuable insights to contribute, and I for one certainly value the opinions of all. Hope to see you on the forums! fdk

Evening Administrata! Finished work for the evening, just chilling on the sofa, watching the news and enjoying a smoke. Here for an hour or two tonight before I head off for bed to get up and do it all again tomorrow. :( That being said, I have holiday time (need to use it before April!) booked for the rest of the week after tomorrow, so really looking forward to some prolonged downtime! :D

Taken the second spot and will work on this after work today. A big welcome to Administrata [mention=571]Timelord_[/mention] and we hope you enjoy our services. :)

Hey Cpvr & rest of Administrata! I'm just prepping to go out the door for work today. Been lucky enough to manage to book some annual leave this week, so only in for two days then have some chill time for the rest of the week. (had lots of annual leave stacked, nothing special planned, just need to use the holiday!)

I've tagged the second spot as per your request [mention=7]Bryn[/mention] and will begin the order tonight after work. Thanks for requesting me specifically! :)

I'm a big advocate of ensuring a forum has a decent amount of content and at least appears to be relatively busy before immediately "publicly" launching. But the simple fact is this is not the way most forums are born nowadays. I remember being part of a staff team for a new admin-related forum that was due to launch back in around 2011. The owner had shut down his original site, which was very popular, and a year or so later had a re-think and wanted to start a new project. He got together a small team of staff/valued members from his old forum, of which I happened to be one, and invited us to join him on the staff team in his new project. We agreed and between a staff team of about 7-8 between us we populated the forum with about 500 threads and 1.5k or so posts before publicly launching the forum, and it was a huge success. If I remember rightly, the forum hit it's first 10k posts in week 1 and was at 100k within 2-3 months or so, and was a hive of activity for a while. :)

I've never set myself a specific criteria for what threads I'd consider stickying. My policy has always been that, if a thread seems helpful to a wide portion of the community, or is an extremely popular thread in a particular section, I'll often sticky it. Sometimes I'll replace/cycle stickies in certain sections if there's a few that are deserving of a prominent spot, just so as not to clog up the forum page and take away from the general importance of a sticky thread.

A big welcome to Administrata [mention=567]MythonPonty[/mention] - your username triggers memories of my uncle and his fondness for Monty Python! I really hope you enjoy your stay here, and I'm sure once your community is up and running on XenForo you will find this great little place to be an excellent resource for any support or advice you need on running and/or growing your community. :)

Just to add onto Cpvr's points above, reposting content is fine if done with credits. Google algorithms won't penalise you for "copying" content if you appropriately source it. For posting on forums, just adding a link to the original content should be enough for the algorithm to pick up that this isn't "duplicate" content. Alternatively, you could add the "duplicated" content in quote or spoiler tags, but this absolutely isn't necessary so long as you're linking to the original source for the content.

In a further development on this, Trump has apparently said publicly to Zelensky: "Make a deal, or American support is out". Not seen it, but reports say he used those words. Not surprising from him, but interesting to see the specific words supposedly now said publicly. Zelensky has responded to Trump & Vance's public dig at him for not supposedly showing thanks to the US by publicly quote tweeting every major world leader who's expressed support on X today thanking them for their support. I'm sure this is going to continue to develop over the weekend. I'm sure this is much more major than we realise, even now.

So, rather upsettingly for those of us living in Europe who enjoy relative peace and democracy, it looks like Trump has fully flown the cuckoo nest and gone completely bonkers, and has effectively just green-lit Russia to pulverise Ukraine into nothingness. Unfortunately, we all know that it's unlikely Russia will stop at Ukraine's borders - at least not long-term. Putin envisions a "reunification" of the old Soviet Union and he will use whatever means at his disposal to get what he wants, that much is clear. In case anyone missed today's developments - https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/c625ex282zzt - well worth a read. Here's the salient points: It is no understatement to say that this was, for Zelensky coming here today, the most critical diplomatic and political moment for him and his country since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine three years ago. This has descended into an extraordinary and unprecedented moment of tension, exploding in the Oval Office. Basically, a public dressing down of the Ukrainian leader by Donald Trump and Vice-President JD Vance. It began by Vance saying to Zelensky that the war had to be ended through diplomacy. What kind of diplomacy, Zelensky replied. He was then accused by the vice-president of being disrespectful. This then escalated very quickly in those remarkable pictures you have just seen and heard. Trump and Vance accused Zelensky of being ungrateful for three years of American support, telling him he was in no position to tell the US how it should feel about it. The Oval Office meeting, from a Ukrainian perspective, was a worst case scenario. Rarely, if ever, are such tensions so starkly evident in front of the world's cameras. At one point, Ukraine's ambassador to the US appeared to have her head in her hands, clearly displeased with the way the meeting was going. These tensions have been brewing for some time. Just last week, for example, Trump repeatedly called Zelensky a "dictator", while refusing to use the same term for Putin. Zelensky, for his part, said that Trump was living in a "disinformation space" created by Russia - a jab that elicited a strongly-worded and angry response from the US president. The US-proposed rare minerals agreement between the US and Ukraine has not been signed, according to a White House spokesperson. Earlier today, Trump said the pair would sign it during their joint news conference, which has since been cancelled. So - what I suspected would happen has essentially panned out - Trump refused to give Ukrainians the security guarantees they wanted and were pushing for, and as a result Zelensky has used the only bargaining chip he had left at his disposal which is to pull the minerals deal that Trump is essentially forcing him to sign off the table and let Trump sweat on it. Question is now, who gives out? Natural instinct says Zelensky will be the one to give in and to go back to Trump tail between his legs willing to sign the deal, but the reaction we've seen from European nations has me somewhat doubting this now. Everyone major has come out in strong vocal support of Ukraine, and very quickly, too. I mean, they all know Trump is an utter madman and effectively a lunatic, but it still does surprise me to effectively see so many world leaders now stating such things almost publicly. The real question I'd like us to consider and I'd like to know others answers on is this - do you think today's developments have effectively delivered a victory pass for Russia and Vladimir Putin?

I myself launched my first forum shortly after I first discovered them - probably around 2009-10 when I would've been 12-13 years old, or perhaps even a year or so before that. Of course, the first few forums I setup were nothing more than "tests" and seeing what I could do with them - which of course at the time with my age and experience wasn't a lot. However, it didn't take long before I began administering/moderating/working on forums that were small but thriving communities, and it was at 13-14 that I created the forum that would "take off" for me. So, it's certainly never too early to begin. :) I've been involved with forums one way or another for the best part of 15 years now (on and off) and it's one of my favourite pastimes on the internet for sure.

I've met few "bad" forum admins or community owners. I've met many that are inexperienced and do things or make changes without necessarily thinking out the full consequences. That doesn't necessarily make them a bad admin, it might just mean they're young, and/or relatively inexperienced, and are in some need of advice and guidance about how to manage a community. That's where great resources like Administrata shine. :)

Completely depends on the requirements of the project, for me. I've never had need for, nor wanted to pay out the expenses required, for a dedicated server, yet. I have used shared hosting packages countless times, used VPS services for my biggest project many years ago (which was expensive enough back then!) and always been fine just using shared hosting when that's suitable. It's only when a site grows to quite a large point that the consideration of needing a VPS comes into play - or potentially if you're running multiple (5+) high-traffic sites.