Advertising solutions for a possible big board transition to XF

[Dennis B]

OK, first of all a short disclaimer: I'm genuinely interested in moving my 5.4M-post vB4 to XF and it should be only natural that I ask questions that compare all sorts of functionalities, resources and add-ons for both platforms. I don't mean anything in a bad way, I'm just looking for solutions that make the transition viable. I'm sick of IB's attitude and their mobile app, yet it seems every time a thread like this comes up over here, people get all touchy for whatever reasons and some of that IB attitude pops up. Please don't suggest paying for custom coding, I can code but have little time for it now, so I'm looking for more established solutions, also I don't want to depend on an individual custom solution for the future. I appreciate all answers that are constructive.

I own a big board on vB4 with 5.4M posts and 300k members. We have partnerships with sponsors who advertise banners on our site. Some of them also send out a weekly promotional newsletter. Initially we used our own email to send these newsletters, but had obvious issues with spam control. Then we looked at Mailchimp and similar services, but for 300k members it's prohibitive.

So we came across a little "mass pm" mod for vB4 that works just fine.
Every member can opt out from this by simply unchecking an option in their control panel, this option being just a custom profile field that we created.
So at the same time, the mass pm mod takes this custom profile field into account, letting users opt-out, and we send newsletter for free, without having to rely on 3rd party email applications/sites and keeping our email database under control.

Has anyone been able to deploy something similar? I was unable to find anything close to this, there's the "MassAlert" mod, but it seems to me that alerts are supposed to be "quick and short" and I didn't see the option to use a custom profile field.

Still on the same subject, I found two choices of banner management add-ons in XF, one which is free yet very limited, and another one which is EUR 60 but seems very complete. The "rotating banner system" in vB does pretty much the same for free. So I'm also looking for an alternative here, maybe something in between?

Thanks in advance.

 

[borbole]

Hi,

Personally I have not seen any Mass PM mod with a custom profile field option. You can request one at the Request forum to be made for you and hopefully someone will code it for you. The same goes for any other mod that you want to have coded and/or modified to your likings, like the ad mod that you mention.

 

[Slavik]

Yea, you'd need someone to code that sort of an addon for your PM's.

Incidentally however, if your sending 300k PM's, a large amount may get auto-email alerts anyway, so potentially just using XenForo's email system may work, or look at http://sendy.co/

Banner wise, there's a variety of options. I use XenForos built in ad_ templates with Google DFP.

 

[Jim Boy]

I wrote my own mass-mailer, admittingly I wrote it originally for vb, but it wasn't that big a conversion, mainly because it was standalone system that utilised the db. It would also check for various opt-in and opt-out values in user preferences, could assess open rates, unsubscribe links. It was crude but we would (and still do) send out as many as 80,000 emails in a go.

Just on sendy.co - it looks good and we did consider going down that route, but ended up falling foul of Amazon SES. They dont like bounced emails and kicked us off becuase we had an over 10% bounce rate - the legacy of having accummulated users over many years, in the end we simply had the SMTP restrictions lifted off an EC2 instance including setting up a reverse IP address, was simply that way.

 

[AzzidReign]

Check out my DFP tutorial for your ads.

 

[IcEWoLF]

I think Theadminzone.com uses https://advertising.digitalpoint.com/advertiser this option and so far it's working for them. You should ask them directly about it and how it works.