Forums Off to a Strong Start (Blog)

[Savage]

Use this thread to discuss the following entry from Steve Pavlina's blog:

Forums Off to a Strong Start

[Zach]

I think you may have set a record for the highest number of registered users in such a short amount of time..

[JKuehl]

as i already stated somewhere else, this forum is soon gonna be the biggest and probably best moderated and useful forum for PD on planet earth. We all can help each other so much.

[Andreas]

Amen to that, JK!

Stay tuned and I'm sure we'll see the number of current browsers skyrocket into the 1000s range. I especially like that this is the best replacement to comments. Ever. I can see other sites taking the hint and following suit in the future.

Steve, you mentioned you were relieved that this launch proceeded smoothly, so I ask you. Was there ever any doubt?

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Andreas

Steve, you mentioned you were relieved that this launch proceeded smoothly, so I ask you. Was there ever any doubt?

Only because I'd worked too many 16-hour days in a row to prepare for the launch and began losing perspective. I'm better now.

[Henry]

Very cool. I'm just glad I signed up early enough and got the name "Henry" rather than "Henry7432874398274".

[Jim]

Steve, I am curious. A forum topic is created whenever you make a new blog post.

Is this a custom solution that you created, or is it some sort of vBulletin or Wordpress plugin?

[Scorpibear]

Steve, congratulations!

[Savage]

The RSS posting is a built-in feature with the current version of VBulletin (3.6.2), so it doesn't even require a plugin. VB's admin panel includes an RSS feed manager that makes it easy to syndicate any valid RSS feed in the forums. It only took a few minutes to configure it.

I set it up so the forum creates a thread with a link to each new blog entry rather than re-posting the entire blog text. If I used full text feeds here, search engines might penalize the duplicate content, and having blog entries in two different places makes it harder to fix typos or make minor edits.

Secondly, I manually edited the blog's template to inject a "Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum" link at the bottom of every blog entry, including all previous entries. That link will show up in the blog's RSS feed as well. This should encourage new people to come to the forums every time I make a new blog post. These discussion links only go to the Steve Pavlina forum rather than to the individual post for two reasons: 1) I'm not sure how to get the blog to figure out what the forum post link will actually be until it shows up -- it seems like that would be a real challenge to code; and 2) it takes up to 10 minutes for the forum to auto-post a corresponding entry here once a new blog post is made because the forum only checks the feed 6 times per hour, so a direct link from the blog to the forum post would cause a 404 error for the first few minutes.

It was a tough decision having to disable blog comments back in October 2005, but the comment volume got to be way too much work for me to manage. I think the blog-forum interconnection that we have now solves this problem beautifully.

[Andreas]

Ding! Gratz!

16-hour days? To prepare for a forum launch? What kind of preparation was involved? Setting up the server couldn't have been that bad, could it?

[Jim]

I think the current solution with just linking back to your forum category is a good enough solution.

In order to obtain the actual link, you'd have to write some sort of server side process to monitor the creation of new topics in the forums that relate to your blog, and the process would have to update your blog post text with the new link. Probably more effort than what it's worth or at the very least, can be tackled once everything has calmed down.

[Savage]

Originally Posted by Andreas

16-hour days? To prepare for a forum launch? What kind of preparation was involved? Setting up the server couldn't have been that bad, could it?

I'll take it as a compliment if the launch went so smoothly as to disguise the real effort behind it.

If I was launching a forum on a low-traffic site, it would have only taken an afternoon to install and launch the whole thing. A high-traffic situation requires a lot more planning, since no single person can manage the whole site alone without serious help. Selecting and coordinating the launch with 30 moderators took a lot of effort, especially hashing out the final feature set for the launch (which VBulletin features to enable/disable and why). Installing VBulletin itself was the easy part and only took minutes. Most of my time was spent on communication and coordination.

[Jim]

Steve, it looks like you've spent some money between the purchase of VBulletin and vBSEO.

There are several open source forums solutions from my experience that seem comparable to vBulletin; was there any particular reason why you went the commercial route?

I'm not criticizing (believe me, I am extremely happy that you made these forums happen). Just curious about the logic behind the platform choice.

[yossarian]

I personally don't know any high traffic forums that DON'T use vBulletin. It's the standard because it's flexible and can take punishment.

I remember back in the day when many sites were using UltimateBB and phpBB, and it was nothing but headache after headache. Loads of downtime, big database issues like rearranging entire tables when one post is deleted, forum slowdown during traffic spikes... you name it really.

vBulletin seems to have shown itself to be the best which is why everyone uses it these days I too have been suprised in the past at the amount of issues a high traffic site can experience just from the sheer volume of people posting.

[Savage]

I still owned a permanent VBulletin license from the time I ran the indie developer forums in 2003-2004. Their terms were such that for $30 I was able to re-activate the license and get another year of support and updates for installing the forums on this site.

Even if they didn't let me transfer the old license, I would have repurchased a new VBulletin license because IMO it's simply the best forum software there is, especially on the administration side. Since my intention is for these forums to become the best personal development community on the planet, only the best forum software will do.

[thadroe]

my intention is for these forums to become the best personal development community on the planet

I already see this happening. Everyone on here is already starting to build a great community. After many months of reading your blog, it's great to finally be able to participate so we can share thoughts and grow exponentially.

Maybe the start of this forum will contribute to the mass awakening you were talking about...LOL.

Thad

[Kudoku]

I have been waiting for this and am grateful for this empowering forum. Thanks for taking me on board! Cheers, Kudoku

[Patricia]

Originally Posted by Andreas

I especially like that this is the best replacement to comments. Ever. I can see other sites taking the hint and following suit in the future.

You bet!!!

[Calculusaurus]

Glad to see everything went smoothly. Already this message board seems more popular than most others.

[Andreas]

Popularity is popularity.

Let's be the best, most positive, most encouraging.

[Daniel Terhorst]

Whoopsie: got a blip there:

Originally Posted by VBulletin

The server is too busy at the moment. Please try again later.

Lasted maybe 20 seconds over here.

-- Daniel Terhorst

[cultivategreatness]

Great Forum so far Steve. Amazing. You are a mentor to many, and its exciting what we can do as a group.

Kick ass job.

Lovin it!

[Keith]

Great stuff! A couple of thoughts:

(1) Will you be syndicating your historical posts too? There's a lot in those that merits discussion too.

(2) The link that says "Discuss this post in the Steve Pavlina forum" points at the forum ; is it possible to automatically make it point directly at the thread for the syndicated post?

Loving these forums ; you had to launch them a day after I vowed to minimise forum usage, didn't you? Now I've had to totally redefine 'minimise'.

[micth]

I was at hockey last night, and after the game overheard some guys on the other team talk about how excited they were that the Steve Pavlina forums have opened up!

[Mello]

Hey Steve, great job setting up this forum. I like the way it looks, very clean and fresh. Also a good selection has been made between area's of interest at the main page of the forum.
The only thing I think could be improved is the amount of messages you see on a standard screen-size, there's quite a lot of dead-space. I mean, could you

• reduce the white-and-blue space between messages as to fit more messages in a single page-view?
• decrease the size of the name + info of a message-poster? They are taking up a lot of space right now but are not really useful in the discussion
• move the last bit of every message that is now this digg/technorati/etc + quote stuff to the side of the message? Most people don't write long messages that take advantage of the width of the screen anyway.
• remove the empty title-line, why include if someone is not using it?

Just tips on fine tuning this forum, the content itself is way up there where you wanted it! It's just increasing the speed of taking it all in that can be improved

Keep up the good work mate!