I started my own forum! - DPChallenge Forums

12/21/2005 10:59:03 PM · #1

Well I did it. I posted here a couple days ago asking where this forum came from and didn't really know anything about creating one. But I put a little effort into it and created my own and got it up and running. It's going to be a place for students like me at Mississippi State to get together and buy/sell books to each other (bypassing the middle man of selling the books back to the bookstore), talking about homework projects, sports, etc. I'm using google adsense to try to make a little of the money back that I'm putting into the website. I haven't figured out exactly how to advertise for the forum yet, but I'm working on it. I would love for someone to visit the site and tell me what needs to be improved or worked on, since I know basically nothing about running a forum. The address is:
//www.nostudentparking.com

Canon EOS-20D

12/21/2005 11:01:41 PM · #2

Well, for starters, your redirect doesn't work in Firefox. And I'm tired of being patient! :P

Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L IS

12/21/2005 11:03:24 PM · #3

Haha my apologies. It doesn't work in IE either. I accidently set it for 150 seconds instead of 15. I fixed it.

fotomann_forever

12/21/2005 11:03:25 PM · #4

Hey, cool, we got ya up :-) Good work!

gaurawa

Canon EOS-5D Mark II

12/21/2005 11:04:54 PM · #5

why even 15 secs ?

fotomann_forever

12/21/2005 11:05:55 PM · #6

Originally posted by mk:

Well, for starters, your redirect doesn't work in Firefox. And I'm tired of being patient! :P

Worked 4 me

Nikon AF-S DX NIKKOR 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR II

12/21/2005 11:05:56 PM · #7

I'm on a 28.8 dial up connection, and that's about how long it takes to load. But you're right, that is excessive for the mainstream crowd. About how long should it be?

Nikon D200

12/21/2005 11:09:07 PM · #8

2 seconds, if that? I know I don't have a lot of patience when it comes to pages loading....

Apple iPhone 5

Nikon AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 ED

12/21/2005 11:09:32 PM · #9

Cut down on the number of forum categories. Especially when you're trying to get people to join.

Have a 'General Discussion' forum at the top, to encourage people to post in one place and generate discussion. Otherwise you'll get one or two posts dotted around the place and no real discussion happening.

You can expand categories later, when you have people visiting regularly.

Art Roflmao

Canon EOS-6D Mark II

Canon EF 24-105mm f/4.0L IS

12/22/2005 12:00:50 AM · #10

Please hold while I think about what to post....

crayon

Samsung Galaxy S24, S24+, S24 Ultra

12/22/2005 12:11:25 AM · #11

Originally posted by Art Roflmao:

Please hold while I think about what to post....

we can't wait

12/22/2005 08:20:52 AM · #12

Bump for morning, since it was the morning crew who helped me create it. Or basically walked me through it step by step holding me hand. I shortened the wait time on the redirect screen to 5 seconds, and made it where you have to be registered to be able to post on the forums. The only other thing I can think of that I'd like to do is have it setup so that after they are redirected from //www.nostudentparking.com to //www.nostudentparking.com/forum, have the address bar still say that it is //www.nostudentparking.com. Otherwise, people will just bookmark or go to the forum site instead of having to see the ads each time. Anyone know how I can do this, keeping in mind all of the forum is in php?

JoshuaM

Canon EOS-50D

12/22/2005 08:24:43 AM · #13

I really think you should skip that first screen. That will turn a lot of people off. In the beginging you should make it as user friendly as possible. Google ads are not bad but that first page is.

12/22/2005 08:59:58 AM · #14

I tried to add the google ads somewhere on the forum page, but everytime I tried it would display the google ad, then display several error messages under it. I don't know if it has something to do with the forum all being coded in php and the google ads being in html. Does anyone know how I could embed google ads in the forum??

LeeD

Canon EOS-30D

12/22/2005 09:20:40 AM · #15

Casey - The forum looks pretty good. Looks like you decided on phpBB. I agree with the comments so far. There are an awful lot of areas to post and with very little traffic, it's going to be hard to get discussions going. I understand the need to categorize, but right now you have very few posts. If you limit your categories to a few broad topics, you should be able to consolidate the posts you get to a few areas. As traffic increases, you can monitor what topics attract more attention and then you can generate categories accordingly.

I am in agreement with the redirect page. It doesn't seem to make a lot of sense to me to have. I haven't tried to embed google ads into any of my pages, but it can be tricky trying to do it into a forum environment due to session headers, and a lot of other things that go on in the php environment. If you feel like you need the google ads, you can always create a "home page" that has the google ads with links to your forum. Now, it would seem kind of silly to have a "home page" with only google ads and 1 link so you would need to generate more content for it to "make sense" to do something like this. If you don't really have any additional content to add, you may want to consider dropping the google ads for now (they really aren't doing much good on a redirect page anyway).

Hope this helps.

Message edited by author 2005-12-22 09:21:32.

12/22/2005 11:57:22 AM · #16

Thanks. I'm going to work on cutting down the catagories. I haven't told anyone about the website yet, except for the people on here. When I get it ready to launch I'm going to use our school's database of email addresses to mass email about 7000-8000 students.

The redirect page is going to have to go. You're right about it being tricky, especially for someone who knows nothing about php. The errors that it was giving were all "session header" errors. I'm going to try to think of some sort of content to go on the main page, but I may just end up launching the forum without any kind of ads. Maybe as the forum grows I can be working on adding content to a main page, or working on importing the google ads into the php of the forum. Thanks for all the help everybody

Edit: I cut the forums down considerably for the time being.

Message edited by author 2005-12-22 12:06:29.

12/22/2005 10:55:13 PM · #17

Ok, I'm almost there. I have everything setup on the forum like I want it. There are much fewer forums, the ugly redirect page with the ads is gone, and I was able to incorporate an inobtrusive google ad into the bottom of the forums. Now the only step left is to let everyone know about it. In outlook, I've managed to get all of the students' email addresses that go to MSU into my contacts list. But I have two problems. One is that I can't send the email from my @nostudentparking.com email address because my ISP is blocking 3rd party relaying on port 25 for smpt. But that's not a total problem, because I can still send messages out from outlook with my hotmail account. The only real problem is sending the messages one at a time. If I put everyone's email address in the "To:" box, just a blank email is 5 megs. Is there a freeware or demo program that will send the messages one at a time, or another easier way to do this? I'm really excited about getting this thing going.

jsas

Sony Mavica CD250

12/22/2005 11:36:01 PM · #18

is this a forum or a thread?

Dirtypainter

Canon EOS-40D

12/23/2005 10:47:03 AM · #19

Originally posted by ibkc:

One is that I can't send the email from my @nostudentparking.com email address because my ISP is blocking 3rd party relaying on port 25 for smpt. But that's not a total problem, because I can still send messages out from outlook with my hotmail account. The only real problem is sending the messages one at a time. If I put everyone's email address in the "To:" box, just a blank email is 5 megs. Is there a freeware or demo program that will send the messages one at a time, or another easier way to do this? I'm really excited about getting this thing going.

Whoa Whoa you are treading on very dangerous grounds here. I can understand you want to let everybody at MSU of the forum. The reason your isp blocks third party relaying is because of spamming. Hotmail will even close your acct if they suspect you of spamming. And your host that your site is on might shut you down even before you have a chance to get it up and running. Spamming is frowned on. The only way you can protect yourself is if everybody on that list asked to be placed there or said they are willing to recieve advertisements.

There is legal ways of promoting your site. But just sending an email to a list that you collected is just asking for trouble.

12/23/2005 11:57:06 AM · #20

I already did it. Last night I sent out an email to everyone and let them know about the site. I get junk mail all the time in my MSU account from people trying to sell me something or lower my rates on my non-existant mortgage. This is something that will actually benefit the students who use it, and at no charge. I read up on the MSU spam policy before I sent the email, and their definition of spam really didn't match what I was trying to do. I've already had a few people register this morning, and some seem enthusiastic about it, so maybe I can get by without anyone getting mad over it.

Dirtypainter

Canon EOS-40D

12/23/2005 01:33:03 PM · #21

ibkc I hope all goes well for you. Just understand I wasn't trying to discourage you. I was just trying to warn of the troubles you could make for yourself. This is a trap that all new people fall into. They say well I get junk emails all the times so whats the diffrence. The diffrence at some time or another you gave your email address out saying that it is ok to recieve some ad of some sort. the list that you complied isn't.

But none the less I hope your forum does well.