fdk

Ooooh, this is a blast from the past!

[mention=2]Al[/mention] - only just seen this thread, and realise it's a few months old now, but all of Arantor's advice provided here is sound. I'm a fellow Brit and manage a lot of the technical stuff for the charity I work for - DKIM absolutely will be the responsibility of your hosting provider to assist with, unless you are running your own server. Anything else you need on this - PMs are open and happy to do what I can to assist. :)

I personally have only bought a forum once, and the venture didn't pan out quite as I'd hoped. It was a reasonably-sized but also relatively new forum, but was started by one of the most experienced forum admins I knew at the time. It was only a short while after I'd sold my own football forum for a significant amount of money, and although the forum I ended up purchasing was in a completely different niche (it was actually an admin/support forum), it was on a similar growth trajectory to my previous forum and I saw an opportunity to be running a new community that had the potential for a big explosion. Unfortunately, shortly after the sale went through and I overtook ownership, I began to realise that I simply wasn't at that time as good of an admin as I thought. I was young, only 14-15 or so at the time, and I was downhearted that several of the staff members followed the founder when he left his staff position at the forum, and activity slowly levelled off. I myself ran the forum for about six months before myself selling it (for essentially the same price I bought it for) when I realised that my skills in that niche at the time were not up to scratch. In my view, the better experience 100% was creating my own forum from scratch and building on the project from there. I have to say though, it takes a lot of time, effort and dedication - probably something I wouldn't be able to offer in quite the same way today.

Isn't the Shrek series over yet?! Jesus, yet another one I'm going to be roped into watching with the nephew. :LOL:

The beat of this song got me feeling some type of way!

I experienced a few DDoS attacks on my old forum and the host always provided information quickly and assisted me in blocking relevant IP ranges temporarily to mitigate the impact. I don't see what a hosting provider would stand to gain from withholding information from a client about an attack on their site, it would only hinder the ability of the admin to take action to mitigate the risk of future attacks and thus potentially cause more future problems for the hosting provider too.

Having a music tone change this morning now...

Off-topic discussions definitely aren't a bad thing for a community in my opinion, as long as they're not derailing threads and are done in a separate area of the forum. Ultimately, an off-topic section, and general community chat threads and such I've always found to be super helpful in building a real sense of community, and building and fostering links and relationships between members. I think this kind of relationship development that we frequently see on forums (think members meeting outside the forum, or teaming up on projects together) would be a lot less frequent without the use of off-topic forums and areas of forums that aren't quite as formal and can serve as a place for people to just chill and get to know each other personality-wise. Great article, as always!

A big welcome back [mention=7]Bryn[/mention] Not to the same extent at all, but recently suffered a bereavement within my family myself and had to have a week or so off pretty much all online activities just to get my head around things mainly. All the team and community here at Administrata were super supportive - we're all completely understanding that life gets in the way sometimes, and that's no problem at all. Really glad you're back, hope things are better in life now and I'm wishing you absolutely all the best for the future. fdk :)

This is definitely the forum I'm "most" active on. I login here most days, if not every day, even if only for a few minutes if I'm busy elsewhere. There are no other forums I am on which I login into every day without fail. I help to run a very small forum as part of my work, but it's essentially a "closed" non-public forum, and only gets roughly 100-150 posts a month, so is very easy to manage. I check in there every other day or so, except at weekends when I completely tune out from that side of work. I am a member on several other forums, but none that I'm as active on as Administrata. While I'm not a top poster here, I spend a lot of time reading, lurking and doing various other things other than making posts, so that metric alone might be a bit misleading. :P

What an absolute blast from the past this song is... quite why it popped up on YouTube recommendations I don't know.

(Huge Rod Wave fan here if nobody's noticed before!)

The biggest game-changer for any forum I've ever run was a sportsbook/betting plugin I had custom-made for the football forum I used to run. It was an absolutely fantastic investment for us, and as I've mentioned elsewhere previously, I believe it was effectively what led to our massive growth spurt and led to us taking a huge leap from becoming a moderate-sized forum to a huge, bustling community. It also increased our forum's income more than ten-fold over the course of a few months, as the gamification aspect of the feature was a huge pull with our memberbase. I've never had quite the same reaction to a plugin - although a forum I used to be staff on, and then moved into owning, had a "post template" plugin for staff use which was extremely convenient. So essentially in the "quick reply" section of threads, there was a small drop-down menu that could be clicked from which you could select various templates of posts (for official things, or service orders, etc). It was really useful and saved a lot of time during busy periods. :)

Was a member of Postloop for many years - what a blast from the past. Stopped actively using it in around 2014, but I did check on it again in around 2020 and it was still around (albeit pretty dead) then, so it must've been somewhat recent that it's actually gone offline. It's a shame, because the idea and execution of how everything was tracked was ingenius for it's time - but absolutely, Administrata has the power and the great Content Team with us to be able to provide just as good of a service! :)

I might be wrong on this, and [mention=1]Cedric[/mention] might be better placed to offer an answer, but my belief was that expired licenses cannot be transferred. Therefore, you'd have to pay the fee to extend support and updates in order to be able to transfer the license(s), if I'm not mistaken.

I always have an open feedback/suggestions section on any forum I run where I welcome user feedback &/or suggestions. I always try to personally reply to any feedback, whether positive or negative, and I'll always review (although not always reply) to any suggestions and seriously consider whether they fit into my existing long-term plans for the site, or if there's a real passion for the idea from a significant portion of the community.

Not just the 15,000 posts mark, but recently we passed the 500 registered members mark too, which is great news and goes to show how far Administrata's reach is becoming. I can only hope our pace of growth continues and we hit the 1,000 member milestone by the end of the year. :)

Tough choice for me this month between jCodes and Please Heart, but Please Heart just pipped it to get my vote this time around. Good luck to all entrants!

I've never had any serious issues as a forum admin between staff and regular members. Of course, I think it's important to choose staff wisely - temperament is important, but my biggest forum was a football forum, so fans of opposing teams can sometimes get a bit heated in the forums and that was completely permitted of staff too, as long as they didn't cross the line into breaking rules, which they never did. There was sometimes a bit of a rivalry between some members and some mods because they supported different teams etc, but generally it was in good humour and jest and not taken too personally. I did on a few occasions have "complaints" from members when moderation actions had been taken against them by particular members of staff, but I never to memory found any of their actions to be without merit so would generally respond to such complaints without much leniency.

This is a really interesting read, and will be an interesting development to follow when/if the court hearing goes ahead. Chegg seem determined to go ahead with the lawsuit and I don't see Google backing down on this, so I imagine it ultimately will be decided in court. I read some of the filings from Chegg linked by [mention=5]Cpvr[/mention] above, and they make for interesting reading, and when you consider it further it really is a serious issue that needs to be considered and some case law set down. They make a very valid point in my opinion. AI Overview is severely restricting traffic to websites. I know this as a result of the work I do - I am often Googling for quick answers to complex questions about legislation and law, which I kind of already know the answers to but want to just self-verify that I'm right, and Google AI Overview provides those answers pretty accurately most of the time because it is pulling that content directly from law websites, Government websites and such. The problem is, as a result of this, users never need to click through to those websites. That might be fine for Government websites, but for businesses who provide free online information and articles they used to advertise for business, it's a potentially disastrous situation. They're losing massive amounts of traffic and reach due to AI Overview. There's also another problem - there are occasions where AI Overview gets things wrong, and sometimes they can be important things - now, this situation is constantly improving, but it's still a real risk. The risk is that people are relying too much on this information, and as it's being provided "by Google" in a sort of official capacity, they have no reason to question it. That can lead to potentially dangerous situations, and is a bit 1985-esque for me. My feeling is that there will need to be some sort of restriction applied to Google's ability to pull content from sites for use in it's AI Overview feature, unless they agree to pay some kind of fee for using the content. That seems unlikely and hard to implement I suppose, as it would require site owners to give individual permission for their sites to be crawled and then the implementation of a new payments/tracking system for when Google uses the content... definitely not beyond their capabilities of course, but my feeling is they'll do everything and lobby everyone possible to stop that being an option.

Recognising and celebrating big milestones on a forum is a good way to increase member engagement, make members feel involved in the growth of the site and foster a real sense of community cohesion, so I'm all for any ideas for celebrating big milestones in general. I do however have an issue with admins who feel the need to post a "community announcement" or similar everytime they hit some sort of milestone... 1000 posts, 5000 posts, 10,000 posts, etc... it's just unnecessary at that kind of frequency and when you're a small community. The two big milestones I remember celebrating on my old forum where our 1,000 member milestone and our 100,000 posts milestone. I also did a huge celebration, giveaway and special event when we hit 1,000,000 posts, and from there our forum blew up and we were at 5m posts within a matter of a few months. It's always good to celebrate & encourage participation in the community - but as with anything we do as admins in terms of "special events", it needs to be done rather sparingly and thoughtfully in order to have the most impact. :)

Hello [uSERGROUP=6]@Content Team[/uSERGROUP] I have just gone through and updated this post to be accurate. [mention=202]King Belieal[/mention] [mention=50]Flower[/mention] [mention=46]Uptrendfinancialsignal[/mention] [mention=141]1stop[/mention] please be aware that you have parts of your slots to complete still in this order, please review the above post and complete your respective aspects of this order as soon as possible.

I've used HawkHost since pretty early on in my journey as a website administrator. Had a few hosts before them, but moved to HawkHost in around 2012 when my site needed a bit of an expansion and never really looked back. The support is great, the prices are more than reasonable for the services I need, and I've never had any major downtime lasting more than a few minutes that wasn't pre-planned and heavily notified in advance. Overall, can't complain at all!

Something about this song gives me feelings... :love:

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: Posts: 50/50 Formal Threads/Guidelines: Please use random usernames when registering. fdk: 10/10 Posts Scorpion: 10/10 Posts InMyOpinion: 10/10 Posts Ravenfreak: 10/10 Posts 1stop(mike): 10/10 Posts Estimated Completion Date: We expect your package to be fully completed by March 8, 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