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View Full Version : Making this place bigger and better


Andy
June 4th, 2005, 01:22 PM
This forum is great -- all the fascinating articles and insightful discussion. And if it get's a little heated sometimes, well that's good. It's really been more successful that I would have imagined. However, as forums go, it's still relatively small.

I'm going through another revision of my sites (check out www.dumbcriminals.com to see an example of the new design) and I'd like to move it up. Right now, there are 232 members. I'd like to see 10,000, but still maintiain the appeal that makes this board attractive for you guys.

On a slightly more personal note, I graduate college and enter the real world in six months. I've been running these sites for almost seven years, and I'm tempted to take it full-time and forgo doing the corporate thing when I graduate. Traffic and income are at a level that I can almost feel confident supporting that -- but that means I'm going to be looking for creative ways to increase revenue. An active forum can play a role in that -- keeping the basics free but charging fee for special features (bigger PM box, upload area, special avatar, premium forums, etc).

So the question is -- how do I make this place attractive to new members, add special features, and still keep it fun for you?

If anyone wants to catch me on AIM to talk about it, I'm alfaspider71. I'm interested in your thoughts, and this time I really want to see some changes.

Idnew
June 5th, 2005, 02:06 PM
I like that look on that new site Andy. Nice

Charging fees for a message board never works. You just have to get that from advertizing like you do on your main site. Don't you dare put those annoying pop up ads back on here though.:wink

The membership was a lot higher but when I reviewed the members over 100 came here from some porn site and was spamming so I deleted all those members and now I try to keep up with the ones that sign up just to spam.

Congrats on graduation:clap