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How To Breathe Life Into an Inactive Forum?

In my opinion, a forum is one of the best ways to build and manage communities online. Truth be told, I’ve actually found myself to have been addicted to forums at certain points in my life. I’ve actually made real life friends and business contacts from the various forums I’ve been a member of. These days, though, while I don’t feel compelled to checking for new posts every half hour, I still visit my favorite forums at least once a day to check on new conversations and reply to ones I feel I can contribute to.

I find that niche-based forums bring together people of like interest. But sometimes, this extends past interests. Long after i’ve given up on some hobbies, for instance, I still visit the forums I’ve been part of just for the conversations. Even if the technologies and software being discussed in certain forums had been long obsolete, some might still be active because of the virtual friendships formed.

Sadly, however, not all forums can survive the test of time. For one, members might move on to other interests. Or in the case of forums that mostly involve professionals and enthusiasts in certain fields, people can become busy with their own concerns.

I wonder what could help breathe back life into forums that have slowed down. Should the forum give incentives for new members (such as freebies like ebooks and other downloads)? Or maybe great content can be dug up and re-posted as fresh. Should the moderators get in touch with each individual member to check how they are? Or in the case of exclusive, closed forums, will being open to the general public help in revitalizing discussions?

I think netizens these days have grown to have very short attention spans, especially with character limitations like those imposed by certain microblogging services. Will forums survive in the long run?

Help Test Out This Plugin

In the WordPress Tavern forum, I mentioned how I would like to see a plugin that would allow me to set a minimum amount of words a comment must be in order for it to be published. I’m sick and tired of the comments that have no meaning such as ‘Hi, Great Site‘ or ‘I’ve Subscribed To This blog‘. I’d rather have a way to simply discard these comments before they even reach my moderation queue.

Will Anderson stepped up the plate after some conversation as to what to create and he has since released the first beta of the plugin here. With this plugin, you can configure a minimum character or word limit before a comment is published. You can also enable client side javascript so when the end user tries to publish a comment not matching the required criteria, they’ll receive a popup saying so.

So far on my site, the plugin appears to be working just fine but give it a shot and let Will know what you think.

EarnersTalk – New Community To Discuss Monetization

David Peralty who has a few guest posts under his belt here at Performancing.com has launched a new community of his called EarnersTalk. EarnersTalk.com is a community forum focused on you guessed it, earning money. The first thing you’ll notice upon visiting the forum is how great the design looks. I don’t think you can go wrong with a vanilla, blue and green color scheme. Everything from Display Advertising to Pay Per Click to SEO is covered on the forum.

There is even a marketplace where you can sell websites, domain names, or offer services to the community. I’ve recently become a member of the forum and I know that with Davids experience, I’m betting I’ll learn a thing a to concerning monetization as I don’t want to make the same mistakes he did.

David has told me that he has big plans for the site so if you get the chance, head on over and register your account. Lets help each other make some coin in this bootstrap economy.

Use IconFinder To Locate Icons

Are you having a hard time finding cool looking icons to use on your site? If so, check out IconFinder.net. IconFinder is a search engine specifically created to look for icons within their database. Unfortunately, I was unable to find any WordPress icons but when I typed in money, I was greeted with eight different results.

IconFinder provides a number of different ways to hone your search such as the ability to control the size range from 0px to 128px, the number of icons per search result page, and the color of the background. The background color is particularly interesting because you not only get a chance to see how the icon looks on a white background, but also on a gray and finally, black background.

In the top left corner of the search results, you’ll find the image format while on the opposite side, you’ll see the meta information for that image which includes designer, license, package, and tags.

Overall, a very nice site that makes finding cool icons a very simple process. Oh, and they have a really cool logo as well!

The Perils Of Changing WordPress Themes

Daniel Scocco recently answered a reader question which asked, How frequently should we change the WordPress theme that we use for our blog?. In one line, Daniel hits the nail on the head with “As seldom as possible”.

This is a topic I’ve been discussing with others regarding the long term consequences of using and changing WordPress themes. Immediately from a branding point of view, you don’t want to change themes every other week or every other month for that matter. It’s best to find a design you can stick with for a prolonged period of time not only to build your identity, but give readers a feeling of expectation. When your design changes numerous times a year, readers are forced to find bits and pieces of information which becomes a frustrating experience.

Another thing you want to consider before plunking down on a specific theme is the way in which you’ll present content. While that 600 pixels you used to present large images to go with your content looks good now, what if you want to change to a theme somewhere down the road which doesn’t have a 600 pixel wide content area? Thankfully, Justin Tadlock published a trick which can be used to mitigate this issue.

Overall, I agree with Daniel in that you should stick to one design for as long as possible and only do a redesign when it’s absolutely necessary or when it’s in your best interests. People don’t like change so in the end, you probably will never win that battle but changing too often too soon is much worst.

My First Direct Ad Sale

After receiving my first direct display advertising sale, I can understand how something like this can be addicting. Back on an earlier episode of WordPress Weekly which is a podcast focused entirely on the WordPress project, I put the call out on Twitter that not much had happened during that week so the show might not be as interesting. I received a few reply messages, one of which came from ThemeAtlas.com letting me know they just launched their site and that we should talk about that. Well, we did.

Working on my WordPress Tavern project this past week, I finally implemented my advertising system which is based on the OIO Publisher plugin for WordPress. After setting up my display advertising zones, I sent out an announcement on Twitter letting people know that advertising opportunities were now in place on the site. As it turns out, ThemeAtlas stopped by and purchased a 468X60 banner spot on the top of my site.

I feel as though Twitter really helped propel me to my first ad sale. I think by putting the call out to my followers and letting them know about the opportunity, with the inclusion that a message like that goes out to the Twitter public timeline aided in the sale which netted me $32.00 that day. So while there is a large following that poo poos the service, Twitter is only as great as you enable it to be and so far, it’s been wonderful to me.

Adding Sticky Posts To Your WordPress Theme

If you’re using a WordPress theme that has yet to be updated to incorporate the newest features in WordPress 2.7 chances are, you don’t have support for sticky posts. Quick Online Tips solves this problem by providing a quick tutorial which explains how to add this feature to your theme instead of ditching it altogether.

Sticky posts are a great way to feature content for a prolonged period of time. You can also use sticky posts to highlight breaking news or special alerts. Just about every theme which supports WordPress 2.7 should have this feature in it.

25 Cool Launch Pages

Remember back in the Geocities and Freeservers days where a website that was under construction featured scrolling marquee messages with orange cones spread across the site? Thankfully, those days are for the most part over with. Instead, we now see creative, witty launch pages which actually make you excited to see the actual site launch. Dzineblog.com published their list of 25 cool ‘Coming Soon Pages‘. Here is my favorite.

Much is said regarding what you should do to prepare for the launch of your own product or service but rarely do I ever see anyone mention how helpful a good landing page can be in terms of gaining email addresses and RSS subscribers right off the bat.