The past few months has been quite an exciting time for me. I’ve just recently got engaged at the end of July, and we are now in the process of buying our first house. Right now it’s a almost-for-sure buy (depending on the inspection saturday morning). We bought a duplex here in Buffalo and plan on renting out the upstairs to help pay the mortgage while we live in the downstairs half of the house.

Looks like a very nice place so far, with tons of room, and its on a corner lot so a bigger yard than most houses in that area. Already has a fence which is nice when we toy with the idea of getting a canine to guard our precious belongings.

I’m happy to say that my main community focus for the past year; Camaro Forums is almost to 1,000 members. It’s taken me a bit less than 2 years to get this far on this forum.  That may seem like a long time to some, and short to others.

I am happy to be where I am currently with F-Body Online (FBO).  While many others dwarf FBO, we’ve managed to carve out a spot in the camaro and firebird world with nothing but hard work.  I’ve not paid a single dollar in advertising, adwords, or anything of that sort for this forum.  I’m not boasting about that because if I did have the cash to throw at it, I probably would have given in and done it but it didn’t work out that way.

Because of the age of the forum and its size, it’s become a very tight-knit community with very little drama (that’s VERY rare on an automotive forum especially) and one of my biggest concerns is to make sure that everyone feels comfortable posting and asking questions.  Think about it- If you’re running a community based on users posting and interacting with others, being intimidated isn’t going to help you at all.  I’ve received dozens of messages and emails from users just letting me know that we’re one of the most helpful and respectful communities they’ve been a part of and that lets me know that what I’m working for is worth it.

I’ve got some very big plans in store for FBO in the very near future.  One of which I’ll give a little hint to here right now.

Been a while since I’ve had time to give updates on some of my communities and web design.

I’ve been quite busy working on a few projects I’m really excited about.  One of which is a Fantasy Sports game with a focus on long-term strategy and financing your athletes.  I wish I could say more on that front, but hopefully within a few weeks we’ll have a full launch.  We’re currently working on the design as well as some finishing statistics touches.  The plan as of now is to make this completely free, with the possibility of creating a even more realistic premium version later on down the road as it grows.

Another venture I’ve started is a Freelance Web Design site.  I’m currently working with another programmer and we compliment one another well with our strengths to help just about anyone.  With that I’ve started designing and coding some wordpress themes that I hope to start releasing within the next month or so.

That’s whats been going on as of recently, and I’ll keep updating on the status of the Fantasy Sports site.

I’m excited to announce I’ve started a new big project site I’ll be tweaking for about a month or so and then put in beta for some real-world testing.

I don’t want to give anything away, but it’s a sports fantasy game that works quite well and is very heavy on the strategy and management side of the sport.

I’ll be posting a full scope of this project soon, but if anyone is a Fantasy Sports fan and would like to beta test for me let me know.

I’ve noticed recently there has been a bit of a split down the middle of thoughts on Moderation of Communities.  On one side you’ve got people who like to have a laissez-faire approach, the other is very tight and rigid rules and guidelines.

I’m not here to tell you what is right or what is wrong for  your community.  I will however, express my opinion on both sides and how I feel about moderation, moderators and guidelines in online communities.

Obviously both sides have their strongpoints and basis for argument and reason.  The less strict communites believe that members should not be censored from saying most of what they’d like to say within reason, while the more strict communities believe that with a very extensive set of guidelines the users will get what their in their community for easier and in a much more presentable way.

Which side of the fence am I on?  Well I’m in the middle of course.  Noticing both sides positives and negatives it’s very hard for me to choose one so I have a moderate (how Ironic) moderation technique.  I believe that the need for guidelines is very important and without them a site can just be a drastic disaster but having too many could also make members timid and second guess everything they post.  This can make them feel awkward and become less involved or flat out leave your site.

My Positives and Negatives of Moderation:

Strict Positives:

• Ability to funnel discussion into specific niche areas
• Not many gray areas for moderators to make mistakes
• More targeted content in most cases

Strict Negatives:

• Users may feel lack of freedom
• Users may think the site has a lack of personality
• Timidness when attempting to post content

Lax Positives:

• More personable staff and community
• Users are more likely to “open up”
• More attractive to new members than a book of guidelines

Lax Negatives:

• Community can become off-topic
• harder for staff to determine infractions and fairness
• loss of etiquette/more user disagreements

With the Gold release of vBulletin 3.7.0, the most noticable differences in vBulletin are the social elements such as a updated friends/contact list, user albums and profile comments. Along with this, and the “Web 2.0″ vibe, of course they added Tags. I’ve never really been a fan of tags, but I’ve started to use them for a few reasons. (more…)

I’ve known of sites “Longtails” for quite some time but it seems to be gaining popularity over the past half year or so. Just recently I was on vBSEO’s forums updating my reports on how well their content-friendly URL’s have been doing for me and I noticed quite a bit of talk about these Longtails.

Q: What are longtails? (more…)

Over the past 3 months I’ve seen a large growth in my Camaro Forums. Up until about 2 months ago traffic, registrations, and post activity were all at a somewhat consistant rate (not as high as I’d like), then in February the exposure of the site really began to take off and I’ve grown from 300 Members (took a bit over a year) to 545 members today (thats 245 in less than 5 months). I’ve been waiting for the time where the amount of users and data on the site would make it begin to really roll on its own. (more…)

Well I moved my ads around on one of my forums this past week (plus a few days) and boy has it worked out quite well. In the past 7 Days I’ve made 10.79 compared to 2.45 all of last month. I know I wasn’t “optimized” then, but this just goes to show you that it does work.

Some will say that the size ads I’m using, as well as the location is a bit “overwhelming”, but I haven’t had anyone complain yet, and registrations haven’t gone down at all in the week I’ve been using it so far.

Anyways, I’ve got 2 Adsense blocks below the navbar (for guests only of course). I’ve got them split to the left and right, with the left giving text ads, and the right image ads. Both ad blocks are 200x200px. Check the screenshot. I’ve also added a message above to let guests know that if they sign up, it removes the ads from their view. (Thanks to Brent Wilson for the help with setting up the ad location)

Heres a screenshot:

I’ve made some changes and changed the design of the site. I was looking for a cleaner, more minimalistic approach and believe I got something that I like here.

I’ll be working on moving all my links and modifications to the new theme for a while.