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Archive for the ‘Sheley Enterprises’ Category

Shop SBT Forum

20 May

The Shop SBT Forum came to me from a client referral and needed some seo work done.

Here is the list


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Posted in Web Clients

 

My Scrapbooking Nook

31 Mar

This project was a scrapbooking forum that started off on phpbb with photopost and needed imported to vBulletin on a new server.

The phpbb site had a bad spam problem with 10’s of 1,000’s of spammers on the forum. I think we pruned 30,000 members before handing it off. I never really talked with the owner, I talked to his/her designer. Which btw, the style on this site look great, really nice look overall. I suggested photopost do the upgrade and they did just fine. I did have to transfer the gallery files the new server and that ended up being about 10gigs. (Google fiber would have been nice!)

  • Here is the list of what needed done from me.
  • Moved phpbb site/db to the new server
  • Installed and imported into vBulletin
  • Moved the photopost files/db to the new server
  • Helped with a some mods and vBulletin questions

 
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Posted in Web Clients

 

Virtual pet list community

07 Feb

One of the most impressive aspects of the Internet is that, no matter what your interests are, you can find somebody else on the Internet who shares that interest with you. And so it was that yet another gap was filled when Virtual Pet List was created. Originally, it was just supposed to be a site listing for pet game sites, but the forum proved to be the much more popular aspect.

Running on vBulletin for most of its life, VPL filled in a niche need: instead of having forums just to discuss one particular pet site, those who enjoyed the genre as a whole could come together. While it would never be as successful as the major forums, it was highly successful within its targeted audience.

While run out of passion for the virtual pet genre, a lot of important lessons were learned from its operation. The growing community resulted in lessons in dealing with customer support, promotion and handling unruly users. Naturally, these lessons were sometimes difficult to learn the hard way by experiencing problems firsthand, but accepting that you’re flawed is how you can improve. The years of hands on experience has led to overall stronger leadership and a likewise stronger forum. The site has survived numerous downtimes, including being hacked, and come back stronger each time. This is because the staff and owners are passionate about the subject matter of their forum, and thus have successfully crafted not just a message board, but an intentional community.

This is a point that can’t be stressed enough. Even if you’re good with SEO, marketing, connections and all the other business sides of things, if you’re going to start a niche forum you had either better be interested yourself, or find some interested people to help you run it. Niche audiences can tell when someone isn’t genuinely part of their group, and the community will feel the ramifications of your outsider status. Someone who isn’t much of a gamer can start up a successful enough gaming forum, but if you want something more specific like one for visual novels or virtual pets, you’ll never see your full potential realized if it’s nothing more than a cash grab to you. These sorts of sites live and die by their staff. It’s how they go from mere discussion areas to a second home. Read the rest of this entry »


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Posted in Successful Forum Owners

 
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