Your forum competitors.......

DaveL

Well-known member
Do you speak, get along or dislike?

I dislike mine with a passion. I wont bore you with the details but the mans an @rse.

Just curious about everyone elses situation?!
 
No not at all, I used to as he's a bit of a **** but I can't be bothered wasting the energy anymore I've got more important things to worry about.
 
I recently created my site because the owner of a site a lot of us used to go on decided to ruin his site. He blacklisted my site as soon as he caught wind that I started my own.

He used to have vbulletin 3.8 and went to this and can't understand why it went from close to 100 members online at a time to about 15.

So I made this :D

I'm fairly certain he doesn't like me anymore!
 
Not going to lie, I totally stalk my competitors and analyze everything they are doing. And when they do something better than me, it pushes me to do something even MORE creative and innovative.

So more or less of a love/hate relationship...
 
Not going to lie, I totally stalk my competitors and analyze everything they are doing. And when they do something better than me

I'm sure my competitor stalks my site. I notice after I add something to my site his site has it shortly after. Unfortunately for him, I have xenforo, he doesn't. (y)
 
Do you speak, get along or dislike?

I dislike mine with a passion. I wont bore you with the details but the mans an @rse.

Just curious about everyone elses situation?!


Our competitors usualy started up out of a fallout with our current forum management.

Either way, we crush them in terms of online presence :D
 
My forum was started in a niche that's already being 'ruled' by some good forums. I am member in most admin forums that matter and really like being active there. In some (TAZ for instance) I've been e member for many years with 1.5K posts even). You need to respect your competition first of all. Nothing good comes from hate and backstabbing. I had this happen to me before, it's messy and it detracts you from the main job: creating a GOOD FORUM for your members. Most our members are not 'faithful' to one forum only. My members are active in my community and most others in the niche, plus general webmaster forums, promotion forums etc. What should I do? Keep them in a leash? As long as they are active in my forum and post good quality content, I am a happy camper.

Competition is good anyway. I like to see who's on top, understand why they are there and try to provide my members with an excellent experience, as close to the biggest players in the niche as possible. I don't run for statistics and crap like this. I just focus on providing the best I can as a forum admin and content creator and the rest will follow.
 
I like the owner and one of the admins, but their members are annoying and childish a lot of the times and try advertising their site on mine. Me and the admins get along so we ban them on both sites lol
 
Don't see the point in letting your forum competition bother you, it's not like you can do much about them being there. And even if they vanished one day, your still going to get new competition coming through all the time covering the same niche.

So you might as well just get on with the running of your own forum and ignore what's going on around you with others.
 
I don't mind, I even encourage my members to sign up there (as well) in some cases, especially if I think they will benefit from it, though I don't recommend any special ones. I think my largest competitor in my niche is/were a spam infested vBulletin forum, which is actually quite active, despite every second post was a spam post (at least when I checked a while back). Needless to say, I don't recommend them..

I try not to focus on what my competitors are doing, I am just trying to increase the benefit my members have of my site.
 
I don't really have any for my main forum... yet I do encourage people often who say they're going to start a forum in competition to mine... it would be nice I feel. Niche forums are like that I think. :coffee: There were two smaller ones when I started mine, but both have closed up, basically, they sucked... hence why I started mine to begin with.

My other two, they're a nothing site compared to some other forums who dominate the niche already, especially military forums. I really don't try to compete with anyone though, more I like to do my own thing and if it works, it works... if not, so be it.
 
I approached my competitor forum, but it turns out the owner is a $#!^head. He jacked up the price of the site because he obviously didn't want me to buy it from him. Then he goes and starts making fun of me and my company over the span of our e-mails. Needless to say, that competition heated up.

What he doesn't know is that my Call of Duty forum has more presence than him. Both Facebook and Twitter vanity names related to HIS domain are taken. My forum has a stronger presence than him.

I say today "Who's talking now?"

I have more marketing strategies under my belt that would take that site off to a new level. He doesn't know I can take his site and turn it into a much more legendary forum than it is now. His members-to-posts ratio is more or less low.
 
I get on well with my competitors - there's little point in trying to ring-fence your membership because they're interested in the niche that your forum covers so they're no doubt going to look for other sites of interest too.

Cheers,
Shaun :D
 
I come in peace, offer equality, and respect. :)

Provided X site owner doesn't try to spam their link all over the place, private message people to join, doesn't use a banner ad in their signature, or make a point in every post to say you think my place sucks & X place is better ...... We're cool.

The bulk majority of site owners who have joined Socially Uncensored have been very respectful. :) And typically some of their members have checked us out and some of my members have checked them out too.

However there is 1 site that I would like to pound out of existence, like the hand of an angry god. :mad:

A user who violated the rules and made some threats toward me in private, decided to make his own site. And he recruited a small clique to recruit members, one of them being a staff member. But more so, he posted A LOT of fake information which was upsetting and when I was on vacation, used an exploit found in the OS (web host) to hack my site, post as me, troll my members "as me" (said a lot of bad things to them), and then announced the site was closing & recommend people go to his site. This happen sometime last year, when we were using vBulletin too.

The result was his site being hacked 4x and DDOS 2x. He in turned, tried to have our domain shut down (contacted GoDaddy and tried to claim that our WHOIS info wasn't valid. It was of course & Godaddy, who we no long use, did validate thing 2x).
 
I don't view myself as being in competition with sites in the same niche - we're all doing our bit to help everyone who is interested in the niche we cover and I'm happy to share links to threads on their sites that may answer a member's question.

Same here. I don't compete. But my forum isn't for profit. It's more of a hobby.
 
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