Member Spotlight Interview - fdk interviews frm
Welcome to Administrata's first ever Member Spotlight Interview. I'm fdk, and I'll be interviewing @frm today and I can assure you we have a great interview for you to read! This is the first of several planned Member Spotlight Interviews over the coming weeks and the goal is for us to eventually have several Interviewers willing to undertake interviews from time to time.
Let's get to it!
Q1: When did you first sign up to a forum, and why did you join?
I first signed up for a forum before the introduction of MySpace, but I couldn't tell you which one it was because there were so many. After MySpace came on the scene, it took too much of my time away from forums because I was a teenager who was interacting with local peers. MySpace made it a lot easier than possible to talk to friends at the time, as believe it or not, we were in the sticks and still had dial-up internet; so, I would need to hang up and call another friend, as 3-way calling was expensive, or communicate with 2, 3, or 4 friends at once on MySpace.
I signed up for forums because it was an easier way of having longer-form conversations over the likes of AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) or (m)IRC.
How long after joining that first forum did you begin the journey on your admin career by starting your first forum?
I would say, that between signing up on forums and then shifting to MySpace, it was about 2 years. However, it was to contain conversations on a custom-built forum that I had made for my text-based game users to communicate on. I concluded that it was better to have a custom forum that could be used in-game over a free forum (MyBB or phpBB, or other free forums that I tried before deciding that a custom-built threaded one would be best) as it would take traffic away from the main purpose of the site, which was playing the game. Having an in-game forum, it kept users engaged in the game while still being able to use the chatbox or move over to the forum for longer game-related discussions.
What was the first "big" mistake you made as a forum admin, and what did it teach you?
Opening a forum in a niche that I had no idea how it operated. I just knew the keyword bidding was $10-25 (for 1 click) in the Forex niche. I invested around $10,000 in content writing and posting, and would've still been dumping money at it, had it ranked for anything and got clicks to justify that. I was lucky enough that a Forex platform contacted me for advertising, proposing a CPA (cost per action, or sign-up) affiliate link. I countered with $3000 for 3 months, and they accepted. Shortly after their 3-month advertising campaign, which they chose not to renew, and reevaluating whether I was ranking or not, and taking the factor of poor AdSense revenue into account, I closed the forum and chopped it up as a loss, reminding myself to never open a forum in a niche that I had no business being in.
How has your experience as an admin developed your technical skills in general? Do you manage your own forum's hosting and updates for example, or do you have a technical person who takes care of that side of things for you?
I think my text-based game played a pivotal role in my technical skills, as I was already hosting and doing the updates (and programming) on my own at that time. Now, I do most of the styling work, and template edits that would otherwise require an add on, if possible.
If an add on is required, I've been attempting to make them myself, if small, but will reach out to developers for bigger projects when needed. The most recent example for outside development was reaching out to extend the Badges add on to have 2 displays of the same badge: 1 that could be displayed in the postbit, and 1 to be displayed in the user profile (ribbons in the postbit, and the corresponding ribbon of the medal in the postbit with medals in the profile).
I let the developer release it because I could see it useful for military or other organizations for their forums if they want their users to display medals earned with their corresponding ribbons; there may be other use cases that I haven't thought that could use an alternative badge too. You can add this to your forum here: https://xenforo.com/community/resources/xb-badges-alternative-icon.9767/
On one occasion, my database crashed and I needed someone for recovery, as Plesk requires MySQL to run, I couldn't even access my control panel to assess the situation. The database needed to be restored from the command line, which is beyond my technical expertise.
That said, I do a lot more command-line work now, but I don't believe I'm to the point that I could recover the database today if that were to happen; so, I take 2 daily backups as I'm still running Plesk, even though it has been the only control panel that has caused my database to become corrupt on two different occasions. I am now considering migrating to a new panel as the previous crash took my forum offline for a week, and I lost 40% of the data (a lot was recovered with the help of ChatGPT sorting out the human-readable text of the InnoDB IDB files to reconstruct MySQL queries to rebuild what it could).
Are there any skills you think you've learnt being a forum admin that you've been able to use in your real life work?
Other than programming for other platforms or sites, I can't think of any real-life work that being an admin helped me with.
What do you feel is your biggest step in learning from the first forum you administered to your latest projects?
My first forum was out of my knowledge, at the time, though I do have an idea of how the forex markets work now; however, I do not trade forex, and stick to other securities such as stocks, cryptocurrencies, and treasury bonds, using technical analysis to make my day and swing trades. The forum I recently opened is in the general discussion niche, so I can drop in anywhere and post just about anything, so I'm not confined to just one topic. Having said that, I should have 25 operational forums by the end of 2025, and some of those will be out of my expertise. Though, I will have knowledgeable staff on payroll that can contribute not only to the business as a whole, but to those forums, as it'll be a job requirement to do so.
I've read some interesting posts about the merging and creation of what I'd personally refer to as "super-forums", with a "one-login, multiple-forums" type system and I believe this might be an ongoing interest/project of yours. What can you share about that, and what gave you the idea in the first place?
I cannot share any details of that project at this time other than what I've already shared as I want the first-mover advantage and to secure intellectual property to give it the authoritative position too. I hope to have that done by the end of January/first of February as I am securing the first round of seed money soon, which will be for the IP (intellectual property) only. What I can share is that the development of the system alone is going to run a minimum of $25,000 (as security is essential), with customer acquisition costs not even accounted for. I will also need to put up an additional retainer of $10,000 to my attorney (for this work alone), plus get insurance for legal purposes and liability protection.
Having said that, it would eliminate a lot of competition if I were to divulge more information, as not many will put up a solid investment of $50,000~ on something that might not work. But, with the introduction of all these new internet usage laws, it should work and is perfect timing, in my opinion.
One of the principles of ROFLMAO seems to essentially be "free-speech" and low-level moderation. This is great for some, but do you envisage any problems in the future with Government's potentially legislating to give "publishers" more responsibilities in relation to moderation?
ROFLMAO works on the principle of Section 230. It is not a publisher, but a platform. That said, there is only light moderation so that ROFLMAO cannot be held legally accountable for what users post to the platform. With heavier moderation, and what I believe will be upcoming changes to Section 230 due to how it was mishandled by social media "platforms" in the past, ROFLMAO should be just fine. Though, other forums that take a stiffer approach to moderation may fall into the category of "publisher" and be responsible for the content that their users have posted, if operational in the US. So, a word to the wise to other admins, use a light hand when the time comes, and follow the progress of any changes to Section 230, or it might come back and bite you.
You referenced Section 230 which is absolutely important for sites operating in the US, but a lot of forums and websites have members from Europe & the UK, which are looking to implement their own laws & systems like GDPR which they will look to enforce worldwide. Do you envisage this being a potential stumbling block in the future?
It's surely going to add to the customer acquisition expenses, but I'm willing to take that minor hit as a loss leader for the greater vision.
Could you picture a circumstance where you might decide that forums weren't for you anymore, and stop being a forum admin?
Yes and no. My involvement in communities might be smaller and smaller as I take on a C-level position and the Chairman role of a larger business, which will take a tremendous amount of time, but I'll still stick around as I don't imagine my responsibilities elsewhere will take me from a hobby of interacting on a forum.
If you were not running forums and especially if you were not working on your current project, what do you think you might be doing work-wise instead at this time?
I'm retired, so I could be on a beach all day if I wanted to. I would probably find myself just sticking around and helping other admins out with whatever I could to keep my mind busy. But, having retirement as a fallback, allows me to have the flexibility to go to the beach or to stay home and help someone install a forum if they wanted.
A lot of people ask me for template edits, as I am all for them over custom development if unnecessary, and I typically do them on my dev installation and just give what I made to them to implement on their templates for free.
There is only 1 time that I charged, and it was to SWC at a highly discounted rate because they wanted support in updating the CSS on XenForo due to how only usernames have a unique identifier and not groups and since they were making so many changes to different groups, I had to login to switch the colors/groups around for new users, remove old users, add new colors, etc. I helped support SWC's admin until they were capable enough to understand the CSS (LESS) to be able to add a user to a new "tag group (@ in posts)" and display the username color that should be shown in posts, but for whatever reason, is not, and to remove them, and to create new groups with whatever colors they wanted.
It was probably a good 2-3 hours combined of back and forth, which I still enjoyed, but I do value my time at around $75/hour, as I would get that somewhere else if I re-entered the workforce with my current experience and education (and why I say it was a highly discounted rate).
It certainly seems that you've developed a lot of technical knowledge over your time as a forum admin. Was this knowledge mostly self-taught, or have you engaged in any sort of formal computer science/technology training or education?
No formal training. Everything was always trial and error, self-taught, and putting what I learned into the toolbox (brain) to recall it easier without having to flip back to. say, my PHP For Dummies book.
This has been the first edition of our new Member Spotlight Interviews! If you enjoyed the interview, please leave a like and add your comment. Feel free to leave your own questions for @frm too, which he may choose to answer at his leisure.
