What was your first website? :)

D37 said:
What is the domain? and how did you "ruin" it?
Click to expand...

http://edcforums.com/forum.php

I ruined it by moving and making a few mistakes. According to almost everyone I talked to I was doing everything wrong. It was on a worlds ugliest SMF board you have ever seen, it didn't seem to matter, it grew in spite of it and it grew no matter how much I did wrong. Every month grew faster than the previous month and just became more and more active. We attracted a lot of people that where really not forum people, we had no SEO, no features hardly at all but the place worked. The last month on SMF we grew by more than 800 members.

I moved to vB4 and watched it drop for 6k active users and 30 days after the move it was 4k active users so the 30 days took out the move effect. I saw our first declining number and watch month by month things decline. I saw it creep down to 2500 active users. Now we bounce around between the 2400's and the 2500's. We do get new member but we have just as many leaving. We have reached a equilibrium it looks like. The member mix has changed, we lost our older crowd that got their hands dirty in the real world. We are getting a younger crowd though we still have people that work and carry tools (the topic of the forum) we are getting more that have not really used the tools or got their hands dirty. We always had those but the ratio is changing. Increasing ratio of armchair quarterbacks. We are getting a more computer savy crowd however.

I killed it, it is a shadow of it's former activity.

I did talk to a lot of my former members, all said they like the simplicity and ease of use of SMF. They all missed one feature on SMF as well. They don't like the search on vB, they did notice some of the bugs though the ones that left were not computer people but simple users. I am not a computer guy either, I am more of an outdoors kind of guy. They don't like how things were more complicated to do.

My hope is XenForo will bring back the simplicity that my older get their hands dirty crowd liked so well but also have nice features that don't get in the way. For myself I want an easier piece of software to manage and what a way to showcase my products. I also want it to be easier for me to have control over people that want to use my forum to make money at my expense. Means I will possibly have to limit some of the social features.

The fact that it declined and for the last months has been going nowhere I think is a bad sign. Caught in a very narrow range of active users for a while.

Stagnant forum stats
Threads
41,380
Posts
508,146
Members
20,629
Active Members
2,453

I have to grant it is not all vB4's fault though the members that left didn't like it. I made quite a few mistakes myself.

This is my first and only forums and am still very wet behind the ears.
 
amigahead.com

started around 2000 , commodore Amiga fan site. shut down and domain dropped moooons ago .

Bad/good memories :D
 
My first Website was motolution.com. It was a Motorola Forum with own Custom Firmwares and Flexes for Motorola E1000, V-Series etc. You can find old Firmware releases under my old nickname Darkromeo :)
 

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