Now a Big Board admin

I’ve been really busy the past two weeks - I bought up another science fiction and fantasy site - AScifi.com - which had a sizable forum, and merged it with the chronicles network forum.

Oh - and it’s also officially a Big Board. :)

While there are bigger forums out there focused on just science fiction, or just fantasy, chronicles is now able to claim itself the world’s largest general science fiction *and* fantasy forums. :)

The forums merger was a nightmare and had to be abandoned the first time - the other site’s forum was running vbulletin 2.0, which is about 7 years old, and even the original vbulletin upgrade scripts wouldn’t work on it without help from vbulletin support directly.

However, everything seems to have finally settled, and the members from the other forum seem to be settling in. I’ve also brought in soe of the mods from the other forums to help settle everyone in nicely.

The other forum suffered a very key flaw - it wasn’t search engine friendly - so it was very difficult for anyone to find the information and discussions held on it, which would also help boost its numbers. The result was that initial enthusiasm slowly flagged, and the forums were little active for its size over the past two years.

I’m counting on the generally strong search engine friendliness of chronicles to see this addressed, and increase the number of new members joining up.

I probably paid too much for the other SFF site - but at the time, though chronicles could boast being the UK’s largest science fiction and fantasy forum, and also the largest growth rate in its niche (I tracked other board stats - posts, threads, members - for 6 months), it was otherwise only 3rd in size.

The addition of the AScifi forum means chronicles surges past them to be the leader in its niche - something I plan to exploit to help it grow and develop faster, leaving the other forums in its wake.

It’s a risk, though - but then again, isn’t all business? Currently chronicles has no real revenue model and the AdSense income is a pittance - SFF is just not a big commercial field.

However, my next task is to ensure that chronicles can and does develop profitability, if nothing else to ensure it can pay for itself, so that it’s long-term future is assured.

I’m also looking to offer forum management services via Britecorp, so that’s another way the forums merger could help - as a showcase for this.

I have 7 years experience administrating and developing some extremely challenging forum communities, and feel that in terms of community relations and development, I have incredibly useful and unique skills and experience in this field.

As selling to communities is something that internet marketing has to deal with, and with my own internet marketing background and extensive forum admin experience, I think I’m ideally positioned to offer very real solutions in this area.

Still, will wait and see what happens.

Meanwhile, I’m been contacting various SFF news outlets and blogs to announce the chronicles merger, along with a press release, so see if I can get this subject going viral - especially in the week in which many SFF fans will be together at Worldcon in LA. Hopefully I can give them something extra to talk about. :)