My Xenforo / Forum Success Story

[dvduval]

Just looked at your Salsa forum, you have got a lot of members.
In my case I thin the motivation is to help a little guy povide a forum for them to enjoy when one of the big corporates with 1 billion worth of sales did nto wnat to do it anymore.
Also our MSM sucks and is very biased and tends to stiffle good debate.
A lot f pelp just wan to do smalltalk.
But I have told them, I wil need to make money in the furter to cover my time adn web costs.

How many other Salsa sites are there out there?
Can they get information from your forum that they can't on Youtube?
I'm no expert.
But I think either go full on adverts or say you need donations to keep going.

How much do you make from that advert on the top right a month?

I did ask for donations in the past. Right now I do a little better than break even and it's good enough. I have another business and it makes plenty of money compared to the forums anyway. Both of my main forum sites were started in 2002.

 

[Anomandaris]

I have a lot higher traffic than that during the same period of time but I don't make nearly that amount of money. I don't really try too hard either. I'd be curious what motivates people to want to give you money because right now I don't see why.

I will try to explain why I think I get so many donations

I think the reason is because I offer something that no one else has. My forum is 100x better than all my competitors, even tho they get way more traffic, I have the best content and people tell me that all the time. I cater to people that want to learn, my site is like a massive Udemy Course

I have been working on this thing called the Game Hacking Bible for 5 years, it's a step by step guide from beginning to end that teaches you everything you need to know about reverse engineering and game hacking. It's not completed but the rough draft exists. It will take all the content I have produced in the past 5 years and combines it into a cohesive course.

Just to show you what kind of content makes us great

Like I said, I'm still working on it. But the preface to book 1 is here and it has 20 chapters

Guide - GHB1 - Start Here Beginner Guide to Game Hacking

Want to learn game hacking? Great, you're in the right place. GH is the absolute best place to learn game hacking. We have more resources, that are better organized and cater especially to beginners. We go in depth and explain every piece of the game hacking puzzle. 7 years of work have...

guidedhacking.com

Preface for book 2 is here:

Guide - GHB2 - Beginners Guide To Reverse Engineering

What is reverse engineering? Reverse Engineering is taking bits and bytes and figuring out what they represent, how they are used and why. This is done by using the scientific method which is forming hypotheses and testing them. In the case of reverse engineering computer code we are...

guidedhacking.com

Book 3 is still unreleased but a rough draft exists

I write massive guides like these two, I have about 40 of them

• https://guidedhacking.com/threads/code-detouring-hooking-guide.14185/
• https://guidedhacking.com/threads/how-to-get-started-with-anticheat-bypass.9882/

All in all, if you wanted to learn everything on my site it would take 2 years if you studied and practiced for 4-8 hours a day.

I think offering the best educational content on the topic is a huge part of it. We also have 300 Youtube tutorials with ~60k subscribers https://youtube.com/guidedhacking that's probably a big part too

 

[Anomandaris]

Put up a "please donate" banner, people will donate. I ask for donations in ~10 different places

 

[Joe Kuhn]

Jumped to your first link. Hugely impressive.

"We're not your mommy" I love it.

 

[Joe Kuhn]

I bet you produce some highly skilled programmers in your program. W T G.

 

[Anomandaris]

Still going strong, that May 4th 2020 Google update prevented 8 months of growth, but other than that things are good


Right before May 4th some keyword I ranked in the top 3 for went viral, so we got insane traffic boost for about a month

Hit 105k unique users per day a couple weeks ago

 

[Hotfix]

Still going strong, that May 4th 2020 Google update prevented 8 months of growth, but other than that things are good

View attachment 247784
Right before May 4th some keyword I ranked in the top 3 for went viral, so we got insane traffic boost for about a month

Hit 105k unique users per day a couple weeks ago

Great job. Thanks for sharing your story.