Buying illegal content

As I continue to develop my forums, I saw a tech forum come up on Sitepoint and rushed in for a quick sale.
The aim was to merge it with Tech Watch and create a larger and better positioned tech forum for the UK market.
It took a couple of days to sort out some MySQL compatibility [...]

Tackling mobile phone spam scams on forums

I’ve been getting a heavy deluge of mobile phone spam on my forums.
It’s not just spam, it’s a scam as well - someone registers a free email address, posts on forums (usually multiple times) claiming they are an online merchant offering discounted electrical goods.
But anyone dumb enough to send them cash, never sees it [...]

Tips on fighting spam on communities

One of my big admin jobs of late has been simply removing forum spam.
Although my larger communities usually have protection, I’ve been developing a whole load of newer forums recently that have tried to be friendly to new users - and with that, unfortunately, forum spam.
I’ve posted a fairly intensive list of tips on how [...]

Social networking - the overhype

The BBC waxes lyrical about social networking and Web 2.0:

The notion of Web 2.0, or an internet model where content is created and shared by users, has given birth to some of the most popular sites the internet has ever seen.

The trouble is, social networking has been at the heart at the internet from the [...]

Web 2.0 - clueless about consumers

Unbelievable - people in Silicon Valley, who are firmly behind the development and promotion of Web 2.0 start-ups, don’t even realise that normal people use search engines.

The thing I’m noticing is that outside the valley most people use search engines to find things. Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc.

Talk about living in a bubble - and [...]

Guide to buying forums

Over the year I’ve bought a couple of forums, and I’ve certainly learned a few lessons.
I’ll post a quick guide here:
Before you buy
1. Determine *why* you want to buy a forum - what’s your business plan? A forum could involve a significant investment of not only money but also time, and factor this into your [...]

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 [...]

Forum building recommendations

In case you didn’t know, I’m a great lover of communities.
I used to be a member of around 100, and now I’m developing a portfolio of my own.
Shoemoney run’s a great show on Webmaster Radio called “Making Money from Forums”, and there are some great tips on there - not simply for monetising forums, [...]

Dealing with malicious users

Most of the people I meet online are pretty sound. Ordinary people in an extraordinary medium.
Luckily, I don’t meet bad apples very often, but last night it seems I crossed paths with a particular rotten one.
A member of Tech Watch was last night sent a warning for spamming his ads and links on the forum. [...]

Creating new forums the easy way

One of the biggest headaches in starting up a new forum is developing content and activity.
The simple truth being that people are less likely to join and contribute to an empty and inactive forum.
So the first challenge is to create plenty of discussions worth joining in with.
For a user by themselves, and even with a [...]

Pitfalls of sending forum emails

I use the “mass email members” feature on forums very rarely.
Reason is simple - I don’t want to annoy the members.
And yet, somehow, I usually manage to cock things up most times.
This morning I sent out a mass email from the Platinax forums. It’s about the third mass email in two years, which is a [...]

Don’t run a mediocre forum

I know. I love forums. I think they have a more real sense of community than blogs anyday.
And in terms of marketing, offer far better potential.
But…the same principles of marketing apply to forums.
Creating Passionate Users runs an article called Don’t Give in To Feature Demands.
Although it’s aimed generically in terms of products/services, read the [...]

Big backups can kill a server

So I thought to do a backup of one of my larger forums while I remembered…
A client on the same server called - their site was no longer responding.
I figured it must have been the forum database backup, so I killed the process and everything started to run fine again.
Note to self - only do [...]

Community building

Well, I said before I was planning to develop some forums, and I’ve started the process.
Whew, I forgot how hard it was to develop momentum with 1, let alone a few. :)
The first one I’ve set up is Web Hosting World - it was originally a web hosts review website, and I was going to [...]

Communities as the future of the internet

Ever since I set up my first attempt at an online community in 2001, I’ve seen online communities - focussed on forums - as a key to internet development.
I’ve repeatedly recommend that clients set up forums - either just for support, or else as a marketing tool in itself.
Why?
Firstly, it helps increase visibility.
If you [...]

Google confirms Adsense adds to index

Shoemoney reports that Matt Cutts has confirmed that the AdSense Mediabot is now collecting content for the Big Daddy search index.
This was something I’d suggested was responsible for Google recently losing part of its index - but hopefully they are through with whatever glitch was causing that problem.
Either way, Platinax is recovering it’s own index [...]

Google loses its index

Seems like Google has lost a section of its index again, especially for newer pages.
I’ve been very busy launching a couple of new forums over the past couple of months, and I’ve seen Google come in and index some of the pages - then waited for the deep crawl to grab the rest of the [...]

submityourarticlesnow.com

Wow, these guys are really going for it with the forum spamming: submityourarticlesnow.com.
What’s even more impressive is that they sign-up multiple user accounts on each forum, all just effectively posting the same message - that submitting articles is a great way to drive traffic and rankings and to use the services of submityourarticlesnow.com.
Anyway, submityourarticlesnow.com - [...]

When blacklists go wrong

So someone decided to set up AdSenseBlacklist.com, where people can report supposed “spamsense” aka MFA (Made for AdSense) websites.
However, there are two interesting things being reported about this.
The first is that websites are going on the list that don’t even display AdSense.
The second…
…well, that’s the fun part. Apparently the person who runs AdSenseBlackList has the [...]

Some webmasters are plain dumb

So while on a routine search, I found some of my exclusive articles for my business site had be copied and published on a couple of different websites, including “big board” dnforum.com.
Published in entirely, with no source link.
I sent a polite e-mail to the sites, requesting these be taken down.
Apparently, the webmasters in question [...]