Kevin Muldoon

2 weeks ago I managed to pick up a forum for what I consider a bargain price. The site in question is RetroWheels, a forum dedicated to car enthusiasts.

I paid $130 for the site. The forum isn’t really active and the people who did post on it were paid however :

• The site came with 10 months left of a year long vbulletin license, worth around $80
• The forum has a pretty good design. Nothing amazing but definately something I’d have to pay a little money to get something similar

I am pretty busy with other things just now so I’ll have to wait to develop it. Add to this the fact that I don’t know too much about cars and you may question this purchase but as I said, with the license and design it was a good price.

Also, this week I have started a forum with a good friend Kevin. It’s a baseball forum for UK and European fans. I’ll tell you more in a few weeks but it looks like it will do well. Kevin will be posting on the site more than I am however I will look after the tech side of things. Kevin is also a huge car nut and once we get the forum going he’s interested in posting on RetroWheels and going 50/50 on that so it should have a happy ending.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Link : RetroWheels

Over the years I’ve signed up to thousands of affiliate programs. Years ago I used to get really pissed off with American based companies who didn’t design their forms to be suitable for webmasters outside of the US and Canada. Being from the UK, this was a big problem, particularly when you were signing up to dozens every month. It doesn’t happen as much anymore but it still does happen (and did this week).

The affiliate registration form would have a field where you could choose your country of residence. So I would choose ‘United Kingdom’. I would then complete the usual details like name, address, email etc however I couldn’t submit the form.

There were a few reasons for this but usually it was one or many of the following :

• The zip code field is only setup for USA residents. Even though I chose UK as my country the form was asking for 5 numerical digits. Unfortunately, the UK zipcode (known as post code here) is 6 or 7 alphanumerical characters long therefore I couldn’t complete the field.
• State/Region : Instead of just placing a blank field where the affiliate can enter any region, the form asks for a US or Canadian state. This is annoying as hell : even though I have told the site I’m from the UK it is asking me which US state I am from and won’t let me proceed until I pick one.
• Tax ID – Another field which is only relevant to USA citizens however the form won’t let me submit my application until I have entered something.

There are sometimes some other USA specific fields but the list above covers the main ones. Some forms are ridicously long and make you enter traffic details of your website and how you found their company etc, which I have no problem with. However, quite frequently this long form will reject your application because you didn’t enter your tax id correctly (even though I’ve already said I’m from the UK!!) and then slap you across the face by clearing the whole form. So you then have to go hunting on the web for a fake address and tax id and enter everything again.

Finally you submit your application which is a mixture of your UK street name and city and USA state and tax id and you get approved. You then have to email the affiliate company and tell them to change the details because they are wrong. In theory this is easy but so many times the affiliate company takes weeks to respond or doesn’t respond at all. So you’re sitting there with a perfect website to advertise their product and you can’t because the form isn’t set up for non USA based citizens.

USA readers will probably be blissfully unaware of any of this but I’m sure readers from other countries will have been in this position before.

So if there are any affiliate managers out there, for the sake of my sanity, please make sure your developers make your registration forms friendly to non USA visitors

To give my forum a start I decided to pay for some forum posting. The quality of posts are not usually that great but it can speed up the growth of the forum. This isn’t the first time I have used this type of service to boost a forum. A few months ago I followed Chris Beasley’s advice and tried out Inb0x and PostOnMyForum.

PostOnMyForum were pretty terrible. Most posters were semi illiterate and their replies were either way too short or had nothing to do with the actual discussion. Put simply, it was a waste of money. Inb0x was a little better. There were some bad posters however the owner Carrie removed them from the job and made sure that their posts didn’t count towards the total I had bought.

For this project I decided to use ForumBooster. I read a few positive reviews and a few negative ones but they kept popping up when I was searching for paid posting so I thought I would give them a try, which turned out to be a big mistake. After 4 days they hadn’t replied to any of my emails and after that I just opened up a paypal complaint and after several days they haven’t even replied to that so it looks like paypal is going to just give me my money back.

After that I decided to post the job offer in the Digital Point Content Creation Room. Without doubt this has been the best place to find writers. Since I am in contact with writers directly, ie. no middle man, I have more control over the quality of posters. I asked if writers could post 2-3 posts to showcase their writing ability and their knowledge of the forums main topics so that I could evaluate the quality of their posts. This turned out to be very important as a few writers asked to take the job on but had little or no knowledge of gaming or technology issues, something which quickly showed in their posts.

I also spoke to Carrie at Inb0x about getting some writers on board. She was replying to all my emails but after sending $5 for a mini trial at the weekend I haven’t heard from her (here we go again!!). She’s been good in the past so I’ll give her the benefit of doubt and wait a while before I contact her again about it.

So in conclusion, most of the paid posting websites provide at the very best, average writers who have no real knowledge of the subject they are posting about and no interest to learn because all they want is to finish the job and get paid. Harsh but true however it is still a good way to get a forum started. Again, I think hiring writers directly via a forum like Digitial Point is a much better way to get good writers in.

I spoke a few days ago about how I made the decision to change one of my sites from a blog to a forum. When removing so many pages from a site you are obviously going to give out a lot of 404 errors ie. visitors would get a ‘Page Not Found’ type message when they tried to view a blog post which was no longer there.

I briefly mentioned the other day that I set up a 301 redirect for some of these posts. A 301 redirect tells search engines that the content has simply been moved to a new page. The blog had 198 posts in total. I checked google analytics and saw which posts were getting the most traffic and I copied and pasted these on to my forum. Then I edited my .htaccess file with the old page and the new one.

Here’s an example of a line I used for one of the pages :


Redirect 301 /2008/05/15/nes-coffee-tablenes-coffee-table/ http://www.electricbandits.com/showthread.php?p=6


This can also be achieved easily through cpanel. The blog had around 198 posts however I decided to only copy about 10 posts from the blog to the forum (mostly reviews and longer more in depth blog posts). I didn’t copy the rest because they simply weren’t relevant ie. news stories which are months old etc. Individually the pages which I never copied were not bringing in a lot of traffic however collectively they were. I realised how much yesterday when I saw the volume of 404 errors and how much traffic dropped. I kicked myself for not realising this had to be addressed sooner and then looked at the best thing to do.

The solution was actually painfully easy. Since I wasn’t going to reproduce the pages I just setup a redirect to the home page. This will direct all visitors who come to the site via a search engine listing for an old blog post.

All I had to do was add this line to my .htaccess file :

ErrorDocument 404 http://www.electricbandits.com/index.php

Of course, long term this isn’t a great solution. A 404 page should explain to visitors that they have reached a page which is no longer there. However, since 99% of my 404 traffic will be from people who came via an old blog link, it might be worthwhile doing something different in the short term. For example, for a few months I could redirect visitors to a page saying that the blog was recently changed to a forum. After that I could create a traditional 404 error page with the ‘You’re looking for something which isn’t there type response’.

I’m hoping that this setup will help me gain more new members to the forum organically (because the traffic is targeted). Next time I do something like this, I’ll make sure I get all of this setup beforehand!

eCardMax is a script I have thought about purchasing a few times though I have been reluctant to buy it because I don’t think I have the time or money to make it a success. You can see the script in action here.

Essentially the script lets you build one of those flash e-card stores where people can send flash animations to their friends via email to celebrate their birthday, anniversary, special occasions etc. The script has a lot of features :

Registered users can send voice messages with e-cards; create an album to upload photos, poems and music files; set up advanced address book; receive birthday reminder alerts; stay organized with card history and calendar; and much more. Admin can add watermark logo to protect ecard photo on the fly.

It does look like a good script but as I said before, I’m not sure how you could make good money with a script with this long term. I’m sure if you got enough backlinks to your site it would prove popular and you could sell text links or banner impressions but again, this can be said of any site. If you’re looking for a new type of site to develop, it’s worth checking out.

Link : eCardMax

Last week I made the decision to change Electric Bandits from a blog to a forum. I had been updating it as a blog for around 9 months however I just didn’t have the time to update it as much as I would have liked.

The site covers topics I’m really interested in – gaming, computing, mobiles, gadgets etc, and my hope is that the site will grow quickly before the end of the year.

The first thing I had to do was backup the blog files and database. I then uploaded the forum and reinstalled the blog as a subdomain so that I can copy some blog posts over. Quite a lot of the traffic to the site was to a few blog posts therefore I copied them over to the forum and put a 301 redirect from the old URL to the new one. I only did this with 7 or 8 posts though.

The next thing I did was get a cheap theme. I chose the Sophist theme from ForumMonkeys. I emailed them about it and they responded very quickly so I made the purchase.

The theme suits the topic of the site in my opinion however quickly after installing the theme I noticed a few problems with the templates. First thing I noticed was that the forumhome template wasn’t designed to accomodate forum rooms without parent categories so if you create a forum room with no parent category the home page looked completely messed up. I contacted ForumMonkeys about it but after 3 days they hadn’t got back to me so I emailed again. At this point I got a reply saying that the guy was on holiday but that I should post the problem in their forums.

So I did just that. Shortly afterwards I realised that the theme messes up with most VBulletin plugins too. For those who don’t know, VBulletin plugins are uploadable xml files which add extra functionality to your forum. They are incredibly handy and replaced the long hacking of code which old versions required. I noticed that some of the most popular plugins messed up the design. I then noticed that the notices feature, a key feature which was added in version 3.6 (it is now version 3.7) is completely missing from the template.

After looking through the templates more it’s clear that this template has not been designed from the core templates of V 3.7, instead it was developed for a much earlier version of VB and has been updated with every new feature. This is a quick way of updating a theme for new VB releases however it means that unless the designer is very thorough, many new parts of code will be missed. This is what has happened with the missing notices problem.

I have emailed them for a refund but I’m not holding my breath for this to be sorted soon. Unfortunately, this is the kind of thing you can’t plan for. When buying a theme you can’t see the backend functionality so you don’t know what’s been left in and what’s been left out.

This is just a minor hiccup though. The main focus now will be getting people to sign up to the forum and start talking. Starting a forum is the hardest part however getting people to register can be achieved via a few ways :

• Through organic traffic
• Through fake sign ups ie. conversations with yourself to give the impression the forum is busy
• Via a paid forum posting service
• By writing original reviews and articles

I’ve ran many forums over the years but this is the first time in 2 or 3 years where I am starting a brand new forum. It will be hard work but I’m looking forward to getting it going