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Post by Kami on May 2, 2024 8:58:41 GMT -8
Well lm in desperate need of help my forum is dying a death already due to facebook yet again lm 63 years old and tech isnt my strong point but l cannot figure out how to improve the look and to attract new members..l had 19 members but only 6 were posting rest were just lurking and taking info so were deleted .. if anyone wants to have a look feel free to see what can be done... mooksinsectcritters.freeforums.net Anyone out there please help if poss l dont want to close it down yet again... Get in touch ok.. Well, the primary issue is that you have "Guests Must Log In" turned on. The please join the forum.. thanks message is not going to get anyone to join. Here are a few bullet points to explain why this is, and I'll try to keep my wording as tech-free as possible but please let me know if anything I say needs to be expanded on or broken down into less technical terms. Most of my feedback & advice will concentrate on practice rather than technical changes, so hopefully it won't be too confusing. It might be overwhelming at points, I do tend to be a bit long-winded, but stick with me to the end; I promise it's worth it. 1. 30 SecondsThe actual statistic varies a bit depending on who you ask, but overall it takes the average user about 30 seconds to decide whether or not they want to further invest their time on a website. For forums, this generally translates into a question of whether or not the user a) understands the forum's purpose, b) likes the aesthetic of the forum, and c) understands the culture and environment of the community. With "Guests Must Login" enabled, users cannot assess the forum for these three points and thus, broadly, will not join. 2. Forums vs Social MediaUnfortunately, a big reality of the internet is that forums are on a comparative decline to social media platforms due to ease of use. Forums require you to create an account for each forum that you're interested in, whereas social media platforms require only a single account letting you find multiple pages and groups and communities over a variety of interests. If you want to have any hope of combating that, then you need to make it as easy as possible to understand your forum's purpose and demonstrate that you have a good, worthwhile topic & community that people should invest their time in -- to go out of their way to invest their time in by creating an account and posting away from their existing social networks, and to spend the time to cultivate new relationships. Having the forum in "Guests Must Login" actively works against that, because no one can see anything without registering. 3. Strong-arm Tactics SuckThis one may be a little harsh, and I don't mean to be disrespectful, but it's a reality you'll need to understand if you want to have any hope of having a successful forum community. Whether or not this is intentional, having a plea to join your forum while simultaneously denying any sort of access without a registered account, will come across to a majority of guests / potential members as a strong-arm tactic to force their registration. At best, it comes across as a "pushy" admin who wants to put low-effort into attracting members (or wants to deter all but a select group); at worst, it comes across as a manipulative admin who is gatekeeping content in exchange for the time investment of registering. Think of it this way: would you become a regular customer of a shop that did not allow you to see inside its windows and didn't tell you what they sold, and just had a small sign on the door that said "please spend money... thanks"? -- So that's the feedback. To summarise: enabling "Guests Must Login" is actually a huge deterrent to budding communities because no one wants to go through the effort of joining a community that they know absolutely nothing about. How to fix it is not easy, and definitely requires a HUGE time and effort investment on your part. I will be very blunt: being a forum admin is not for everyone, especially not in this day and age. Many, forums will take months, even years to see any form of success (consistent activity/membership). Many more forums will actually never see significant success (whether it's a lot of daily activity, a lot of active members, or both). As a forum admin, you have to be okay with that, and you have to not give up and close down the forum because it's taking too long to see success. You mentioned that your forum is "dying a death already due to facebook yet again". That's going to be your reality forever unless facebook shuts down. Facebook communities already have a built-in pool of potential users. They don't need to advertise or spread the word about their group because facebook did all the work for that already. It built a platform that gathered people to 1 spot, created an algorithm to show those people posts and pages of things they might be interested in, and then made it simple to join those groups with an easy single click. If you want to be a forum admin, you just have to be okay with that. If you're not okay with that, if you don't want to face the sisyphean task of fighting against social media to establish your community, then honestly, running a forum may not be for you. But if you're committed and dedicated, and are willing to invest the time and effort, then there are ways to increase your forum's chances of success. 1. Turn off guests must log in. It's doing absolutely nothing for your success. Instead, leave the forum open and visible to everyone, but set the individual boards of your forums up (in your admin panel, under the "categories and boards" section) so that the only people can create and reply to threads are members & staff. Set the viewing and access permissions to "everyone", that way guests (read: potential members) can see what your forum is about, and the kind of community you want to build. 2. Be the ideal user you wish you had. The admin of a forum is the person that sets the tone. Create topics to discuss -- and I mean really, discuss; don't just create a thread like "Some people's favourite colour is purple" and then expect people to jump in with their opinions and thoughts. You need to be an active member of your own forum, because potential members are much more likely to join a forum where the admin is dedicated and involved. 3. Have a good looking, but functional, forum. Aesthetics are subjective, but there are a few common threads that are universal: everyone likes colours that aren't particularly harsh or cause eye strain; people prefer text that is easy to read in size and appearance; people like images that represent the theme of the forum's topic. It's totally okay if you're not technical; posting here can get you any technical help you need (I may be biased but the support PB provides on this front is top-notch) and you can also access the Theme Library to find a theme to install on your forum. 4. Be member-focused. It's not just a "forum", it's a community. You have to be community-minded and let that be the guiding post for what you do and the decisions you make. For example with the Guests Must Login -- if you had, perhaps, instead of "how do I get members" or "how do I protect my content" , been member-focused and oriented towards community, the question might have been "will turning on this feature increase the quality of the member / guest experience?" or "will turning on this feature encourage conversation?" At the end of the day, a forum is only as successful as the community you cultivate. It's like a garden: till the earth, plant good seeds, care for the plants with whatever needs they may have. Putting the garden inside a concrete box and demanding someone become a member of your exclusive garden club before viewing your garden will just kill the beautiful things inside. 5. Lastly, pivot your efforts to focus more on "converting", with "attracting" being a secondary goal. There are a lot of forums out there that are beautiful and attractive but their turnover rate (the people who join, and then leave or fall inactive) is incredibly high because the forum has very little substance and the community bonds are weak. Attracting members is important (which you can do through advertisement on social media or on other forums that have a section for advertisments), but member retention is actually the key to success. Having a small, dedicated community leads to more conversion ("attracting" guests to become members), though it might seem less successful initially because it's slower and less, "numbers go up fast" with regards to who registers or not. -- This was long, but I hope it helps you out. Please let me know if you have any questions or if you want me to expand on any of the above thoughts. Best of luck!
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Post by Kami on May 2, 2024 8:15:00 GMT -8
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Post by Kami on Apr 30, 2024 22:57:30 GMT -8
Forum URL: (private)
Heya,
This isn't exactly a support-needed kind of question so please feel free to redirect me to an appropriate board if this isn't it!
I'm coming back to web designing after some time away and my usual image storage platform, Discord, recently made changes to the way it formats and stores the links to the images uploaded onto it. Within a few days any image I try to embed on ProBoards goes inactive/isn't embedded anymore. I'm 99% convinced it's a Discord-side thing and not ProBoards-side. Not a huge issue, just means I need to move to something else.
I'm wondering what free image hosting platforms people are using to host their site graphics? (I use them pretty heavily in the forum wrapper sections for decor using actual URLs.) Preferably ones where they may not be open to the public since they're just site graphics, since my private Discord channels don't cut it anymore.
Thanks for any help or advice!
So, Discord is not an image host. Which, I'm pretty sure you know and were just trying to capitalise on the fact that Discord hasn't historically minded when people are using their bandwidth outside of the actual app (no judgement, honestly) due to the ease of use. However, they don't want to be a permanent CDN (content delivery network) especially when their storage was being used to spread malware, so they switched to use temporary storage instead, meaning any attachments (images, files, etc) in-app gets auto-refreshed, but any external links will be busted after a period of time. If you are looking to host site graphics, is there any reason you don't upload your images to your theme directly? Those links are permanent, and you can upload your own if you go to your theme section. Hover over the theme you want to add images to under the "Theme Manager" page, and an "Images" button should appear on-hover. Click that, and under all the default images that you can replace should be a custom images section. Upload, then click the "link" button if you need the URL (don't worry if it starts like //storage, that's fine) OR if you are familiar with theme variables, you can go to your layout templates and select the theme you want to update + go to the template you want it to appear on + click on the right-hand side in the variable tree on "images" and find the image you want (the variable will be whatever file name you gave it, which you can change in the images section as well). For in post images, I would recommend imgbb or imgur. Imgur in particular doesn't like being a CDN, so make sure you're only using them for in-post images and not avatars, sigs, or other theme graphics. Hope this helps!
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Post by Kami on Apr 28, 2024 9:13:21 GMT -8
Also, to answer a little more directly, no you can't change the mobile view. It was intentionally created this way -- completely separate stylesheet and HTML structure from the desktop version that we don't have access to -- to provide mobile users a low-data way to access the forum on a device. It might seem silly now, but when v5 was initially released in 2013 not everyone had a smart phone and data plans were exceedingly limited in comparison to modern data plans.
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Post by Kami on Apr 26, 2024 8:40:50 GMT -8
I do not have the ability to make this for you personally, but I did want to chime in to levelset expectations: while a plugin to track visitors might be possible, it would not be able to differentiate "people" traffic from visits from bots (like search engine indexers).
You may also want to be more specific in what sort of data you want this plugin to give you -- "number of people" isn't specific enough. What is the date range for the number to be gathered from? What do you consider "a visit"? Are you only looking for a fast food sort of "99 Billion Served" type of output or do you want additional things to be displayed? Where do you want this information displayed on your forum, and how do you want this info to appear visually?
The more details you can provide about what you want, from function to form, the better a plugin creator can tell whether or not what you want is a) technologically possible, and b) permissible under PB's plugin development guidelines.
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Post by Kami on Apr 26, 2024 8:35:14 GMT -8
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Post by Kami on Apr 23, 2024 8:31:56 GMT -8
I can't speak to the plugin part as you know but one additional point of consideration: there are different terms for "DST" across the globe (eg: British Summer Time aka BST) so you may have to also factor in a way to localise or use a more generic term.
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Post by Kami on Apr 23, 2024 8:02:15 GMT -8
Ah, Newark (affectionate). Haven't been to Jersey in years but I lived there for a time...
In any case, I just wanted to mention a few things to (hopefully) levelset expectations regarding forum activity.
1. Lynx already mentioned that PB has only deleted inactive forums twice in the last 20 years. I want to add the additional information of what the trigger was: six months or longer without a single page view. Not posts, not member engagement, just 1 page view (and it could have come from anywhere). Compared to the total number of forums PB hosted at the time, the number of forums that fit the above criteria was incredibly small and not a lot of forums were removed. In fact, one of the forums I used to be active on had been dead for years as a community, but managed to escape deletion as people occasionally logged in For The Memories.
2. There seems to be the impression on your end that guests = individuals who intend to view and genuinely engage with your content. To be absolutely clear, on PB, the word "guest" is simply a distinguishing term between "user who is logged in" and "user who is not logged in". Even a legitimate member is counted as a guest up until they log into their account. Guests can also be non-human users, as well as non-legitimate human users (ie: spammers). Yes, human spammers exist, and yes they can and do post on forums irrespective of any messages or rules addressed to them. It's a lousy marketing tactic, to increase SEO hits to whatever site or sites they're spamming about, and they are absolutely human users — but they will never respond to you or engage with the community genuinely.
3. Kind of related, in a way, but there seems to be expectations here that if you create posts and things to engage with, that users will just sort of... appear, and be compelled to join and engage. While that may have been true once upon a time, the fact is now that forum admins have an uphill battle against other kinds of online communities, like social media and discord. Creating content and bumping advertisement threads, quite simply, doesn't have the same amount of power as it once did. On top of that, you have so many more websites and potential results in search engines to compete against now versus when forums were in the height of their popularity — a single google search for your basic keywords returns thousands of results in a fraction of a fraction of a second, some of which are websites twice the age of your forum, others of which have been promoted with a lot of financial investment. Unfortunately, unless you got really lucky and were able to come up with the perfect URL that also included your keyword(s) AND had the perfect storm of organic content from legitimate members AND had the right amount of indexing bot traffic at the right time, this will always be an uphill battle for forums that are either new, or have been established for a while but fell inactive or had a lull in new members / content.
4. I really think you should alter your thinking with regards to people liking posts from your forum on twitter versus them not engaging on your forum. Firstly, guests cannot "like" posts on PB; the option doesn't even appear for them. Even if we assume the people engaging on twitter with a "like" are real people, who actually read your content, they literally cannot do what you expect them to do. Secondly, getting someone on a platform like twitter to join a forum is like pulling teeth. The reason people like to use twitter (and other social media) is because they only need ONE account to access a plethora of communities and can curate their experience to match their interests. Unless they are specifically looking to join a forum community, you will have an exceedingly difficult time turning twitter / social media engagement into active, long-term forum members. it's not impossible, but you have to really stick to your guns and also levelset your expectations on success better. Lastly, twitter / social media has bots too. There are your standard product spammers, your run-of-the-mill NSFW spammers, but you also have "likes" spammers, service scam spammers, account recovery spammers... the list goes on. "Likes" on a tweet do not always mean genuine engagement. I have a few thousand followers on twitter and at least a handful of my likes on any given post are from either suspect accounts, or lurkers (folks who "like" stuff but never engage fully).
I don't say any of this to discourage you; I love forums and I honestly kind of wish we could return to the era of internet where forums were the go-to place for interest-based communities with social media focused more on personal connections.
But in the last few threads you've created, I've noticed a worrying train of thought that there's some sort of conspiracy or disingenuous presentation of information from support helpers because you can't believe that you can get [insert engagement type here] without it being genuine or converting into long-term, reliable membership, and that there is some secret, hidden reason or magical thing you're missing or something is otherwise "wrong". Unfortunately, the reality is that is absolutely possible, and very common. It's an uphill battle for all forum admins in this day and age (my forum will be turning 20 next year and this is still a struggle for us), but especially more so for forums that are ~5 years old or younger.
There's really nothing weird or unusual about what you're facing. The truth of the matter is that forums, quite simply, aren't as popular as they used to be + the activities of bots and human spammers to approximate "genuine" engagement has increased. That's it, that's genuinely it.
People with successful forums tend to have been at it much longer, have a topic that people are really passionate about / engaged with, hit a niche where they're one of the only communities for that topic, were super lucky in their SEO setup, or some combination of the above. Otherwise, we all struggle to find members in this era of the internet, and that's simply something we have to accept as a price of sticking with forums versus creating communities elsewhere.
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Post by Kami on Apr 23, 2024 7:28:01 GMT -8
Bedankt voor de suggesties. Maar beide programmaas zijn reeds aanwezig. Echter de vraag is of het mogelijk is de keuze van de grootte en kleur van de tekst die wordt gemaakt, vast te zetten voor een volgend bericht. dus bij het volgend bezoek en maken van een bericht automatisch de grootte en kleur van de vorige tekst. Ook de Google vertaling reeds aanwezig. Maar deze moet bij elk bezoek weer overnieuw worden ingesteld hallo! my dutch is too rusty to speak fluently (don't tell my opa and oma) but for the second issue, unfortunately ProBoards doesn't provide language packs. if you need to have the forum be written in dutch permanently, you will have to manually change all of the text yourself. you can do this by going to the ADMIN panel, and under the STRUCTURE option select LAYOUT TEMPLATES. all of the text that can be changed in the forum is available here, as this is where the HTML structure of the forum is located. if you have more than one theme, you will need to change them all manually in this section by selecting the theme at the top left of the page that you would like to edit. for the things that the layout template can't change, you can use this plugin to change them: www.proboards.com/library/plugins/item/194
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Post by Kami on Apr 21, 2024 19:31:19 GMT -8
I think you are right Kami - that sounds like what I remember. It was some time ago. Cheers if that's the case, then this is absolutely possible and totally permissible on PB — the RSS feed isn't submitting anything to PB's servers, just displaying some information coming from another site. I would be happy to walk you through adding RSS feeds onto your forum, if you're interested in doing so — you would just need to select the site(s) you want a feed from and I can help you with the rest.
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Post by Kami on Apr 20, 2024 23:06:19 GMT -8
saintmike - just for my own curiosity, can you give me a link to a site's post that has this please? An old site I used did - not sure its still going. BUT - they had a link to these sports outlets/sites and the posts seemed automatic. They weren't technically members - like a bot I guess. I'm trying to remember their "names". They may well have been circulating data from other sites too. It was sport. They weren't common ones. I guess they were like those search engines that seem to come in as guests and look for information. BUT - they "posted" results etc. If it all comes back to me I'll post here. Is it possible you're referring to an RSS feed, by any chance? Like, instead of a "post" like this thing I'm writing right now, some other part of the forum where "posts" from external sites appeared? Something like one of these ESPN feeds, that was fed into an RSS reader, and the HTML for said reader was put somewhere on the forum HTML (like the sidebar, a table on top of the forum, or on a custom page), kind of like >> this<< (featuring an MLB feed, my personal sports favourite). The key note is whether or not the automatic content appeared in a post OR somewhere else on the forum. If the forum was a PB forum and the auto-content appeared in a post, then either: a) it wasn't automatic it just looked that way, or b) the forum was violating the developer guidelines for plugins/scripts. The more likely answer, however, if it did NOT appear in a post, and instead appeared in a box somewhere on the forum or on a custom page, or something of that nature, is that it was an RSS feed coming directly from the sportsball website(s) that would then provide the 'automatic' updates you're referring to -- this wouldn't be against the developer guidelines for PB because no information if being sent to the PB servers. There is a small chance they could have used something like the Admin-Only HTML in Posts plugin to add the HTML for an RSS feed in their posts, but I'm not entirely sure that this plugin is particularly well known.
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Post by Kami on Apr 19, 2024 11:34:09 GMT -8
Maybe I should just stop. I can’t blame it all on ocd I think maybe I should stick to blogging at this point. 😔 What should I do just stay with social media and blogging? On the off chance you're still lurking to read my reply even though you decided to delete your account here, I wanted to answer. The purpose of my query and the things I pointed out were not to discourage you from making a forum, but rather to look inside yourself, into what your goals are, and see what you feel you want to make a forum about. You have a lot of ideas for forums, but it doesn't seem like you feel particularly strongly about developing a community for these topics. It's totally OK to not have a solid idea yet, and to try a lot of different things until you find something that works for you. But I wanted to guide you to making that examination, both to help you figure out what it is you're trying to create, and also to encourage you to be a bit more deliberate in the choices you make whenever you do create a forum. If you want to continue social media and blogging, that's up to you. If you want to continue making forums, that is also up to you. You just have to understand the social media and blogs are very different platforms compared to forums because forums are self-contained social ecosystems that are cultivated by the creator of the forum for the purpose of community interactions centred on discussions of some nature. Social media and blog platforms are really more for you to get ideas out there, and then receive some sort of acknowledgement through likes/comments/shares of that particular thing. I don't think you needed to delete your account here, and I don't think that you need to give up making forums if you don't want to. But the whole point is, you gotta figure out what you want -- we (the volunteers on PB support) love to help with those ideas, but if you aren't passionate enough to pursue them, that's something that we can't provide for you.
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Post by Kami on Apr 19, 2024 11:24:57 GMT -8
There is no way to make anything automated when it comes to posts, as all requests to PB's servers (such as submitting a post) are required to be made manually by a human user. Thank you for the prompt response, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing anything. Have a great weekend! You too!
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Post by Kami on Apr 19, 2024 10:12:16 GMT -8
Forum URL: (private) We have an event coming up that I would like to be able to have a programs I have written that displays data on TVs at my house be able to create a post in specified thread as I update it on my end. For context it is for the NFL draft next Thursday. As I make a selection here (ie what pick, team, player), it updates all my TVs to display player info, best available left, teams draft picks, etc. So I would like it to either create a post saying who was taken or upload an image I would host externally to show in the thread with more detail. I thought about doing something at the top or a separate page for this, but I want it to update live and not have to have people scroll back to original post or to the top each time. Is something like this possible with ProBoards? Sorry if the explanation was bad, still trying to iron out details. There is no way to make anything automated when it comes to posts, as all requests to PB's servers (such as submitting a post) are required to be made manually by a human user.
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Post by Kami on Apr 19, 2024 10:08:27 GMT -8
I added descriptions for most of the boards. And more areas for chatting idk what else to do There are still a lot of empty boards. As the forum admin, you have to be the one to initiate all of these early threads/discussions. A lot of members will not post, and a lot of guests will not join, if there are a lot of boards with most of them being completely empty. Create more discussion threads; as an example, you have "Chat With Other Readers". So start a thread per the board discussion "sharing experiences" as per the board description. Similarly, create a thread in "Imagery" to talk about your favourite artworks for your decks. As an admin, it is your responsibility to create content until you get members to participate (and you still must continue creating content even after, but you can do so at a more relaxed pace). With most of the boards being empty like this, it kind of looks like you are waiting for members to start conversations for you, and generally speaking people don't really want to do that. When you're starting out, you really should have 1 thread in every board that invites prospective members to join in -- and something more like "here's an idea what do you think"; these are exchanges, so you need to offer your own thoughts as well. If you are daunted by the amount of threads you need to create for each board, then consolidate. Personally, I don't think you need a category for "practice" and "the cards" separately (imo they can be combined into a single category where you have a board called 'practice' and a board called 'the cards' with subboards), but if you like the current set up, try grouping similar things together (eg: Reading Exchanges, Request a Free Reading, and Looking for Volunteers could all be a single board and you can use the label system to tag which threads are which). Similarly, "Tips" and "Techniques" could be a single board as they're both really the same thing. Lastly, you have a "progress" board, that says Open a thread to have your personal blog related to your practice. Gently, I think this board isn't really valuable. If someone wanted to *blog* about their experiences, then they'd make a blog, not join a forum. A forum is about community and interacting with each other as a group; a blog is a platform where interactions generally go one way (readers > author, and the author may or may not respond). --- Honestly, I kind of have a question for you. Please understand that it's not a criticism or negative question, just something I've been curious about for a while seeing the types of forums you create. What is your goal in making a forum?Making a lot of forums isn't a bad thing, necessarily, but looking over your post history, you have many, many boards that you seem to lose interest in after a time. You have, in the past, posted the following forums: - Dragon's Blood - A Blog/Chat forum for creative and spiritual things - Written in Ouija - A Readings forum where you want people to give you things to make content/readings about - The Ouija Technique - Same thing - Lucy's Den - General Chat - Another spirital forum - Spiritual Minds - a spiritual forum - Mental health and spirituality - a spiritual / mental health forum - Bear With Me - a political forum - A promotion board - The final radiant - another blog forum - Digital Campfire, another general chat - This new tarot board Of these forums, only 3 are still accessible; of those 3, 1 seems abandoned, and 1 is in maintenance mode; the last of the three is the forum you're asking reviews on in this thread. So what is your goal? You seem to want to create communities, but a lot of the forums you create lean towards people submitting content for you to do stuff with; the general chats seem more interactive, but it seems you give up on them after only a few months. Maybe the problem isn't that you're not getting reviews on how to improve, but rather because you don't seem to feel strongly about the types of forums you create and you're kind of throwing ideas around to see if anything sticks? I don't know, I'm just really confused at what you're looking for.
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