Joined
·
1,047 Posts
I've been running this forum out of pocket for pretty much 8 months now. I think everyone can agree it's been run pretty well. There haven't been many (if any at all) outages and I think only a few spammers and I banned/removed their posts promptly.
I love my XCR rifle and will continue to offer the forum for free because I benefit from all the great knowledge you guys have dispensed here.
Having said this I would also love to add features, improve the layout and generally spend more time on the forum doing whatever admins are supposed to do
Here are some things I would like to do in the future:
- Significantly improve the layout, so that it's not using the generic layout that came with the forum software (you would still be able to change back to it in your preferences later on.)
- My hosting company does nightly backups of the data but they do not guarantee it in writing. I do backups occasionally but ideally it would be nice to do a backup every single night to my home computer and then burn it on DVD/CD or tape once a week. I think this is a must as the forum continues to grow and it becomes too valuable to have anything happen to it.
- Improve the chat on the main page. Make it more responsive (page doesn't have to reload to see new messages), allow it to hover so that you could have it open in a separate window (so you could chat while browsing threads), improve the history feature so that you could view the chatlogs by week or month for example, make it searchable. There are lots of things I can do to make it a more useful feature of this site.
- Move to a different hosting company with even faster connection and tons of hard drive space so that I could increase the file upload limits when posting messages. I could also look at adding personal galleries for every member where you can upload all of your photos. I believe ar15.com has something like this but it's detached from the main forum site. I would integrate it with the forum.
- Bridge the forum message to email discrepancy. Right now every time someone hits reply to a forum message notification they get in their email box it doesn't work (this is to preserve the privacy of peoples emails). Ideally you would be able to hit reply to a forum message notification in your email program and the reply would actually go back into the forum and be forwarded to the forum inbox of the person. If you didn't understand this part, don't worry It'll be a really nice fix because a bunch of people have had this problem already.
Whatever else you guys would want!
Members who donate would have some sort of icon or visual identifier in your posts showing that you are a donor to the site. To make you feel special of course!
Content wise there will probably not be anything special you can view as a donor unless there is demand for a donating members only section.
The purpose of this post is to gauge how much support there would be if I added this donation feature (and thus whether it would be worth it for me to spend time setting it up).
I may also look into a special category of donors for businesses and maybe there would be some advertising options, although I would shy away from doing a banner ad on every page. More likely it will be a tab at the top to a "Sponsors" page where your business would be listed.
I had planned on getting at least 500 members before making this post but several people have messaged me asking how they can help, so here it is.
Thanks to you all for making this forum a success!
:tiphat:
I love my XCR rifle and will continue to offer the forum for free because I benefit from all the great knowledge you guys have dispensed here.
Having said this I would also love to add features, improve the layout and generally spend more time on the forum doing whatever admins are supposed to do
Here are some things I would like to do in the future:
- Significantly improve the layout, so that it's not using the generic layout that came with the forum software (you would still be able to change back to it in your preferences later on.)
- My hosting company does nightly backups of the data but they do not guarantee it in writing. I do backups occasionally but ideally it would be nice to do a backup every single night to my home computer and then burn it on DVD/CD or tape once a week. I think this is a must as the forum continues to grow and it becomes too valuable to have anything happen to it.
- Improve the chat on the main page. Make it more responsive (page doesn't have to reload to see new messages), allow it to hover so that you could have it open in a separate window (so you could chat while browsing threads), improve the history feature so that you could view the chatlogs by week or month for example, make it searchable. There are lots of things I can do to make it a more useful feature of this site.
- Move to a different hosting company with even faster connection and tons of hard drive space so that I could increase the file upload limits when posting messages. I could also look at adding personal galleries for every member where you can upload all of your photos. I believe ar15.com has something like this but it's detached from the main forum site. I would integrate it with the forum.
- Bridge the forum message to email discrepancy. Right now every time someone hits reply to a forum message notification they get in their email box it doesn't work (this is to preserve the privacy of peoples emails). Ideally you would be able to hit reply to a forum message notification in your email program and the reply would actually go back into the forum and be forwarded to the forum inbox of the person. If you didn't understand this part, don't worry
It'll be a really nice fix because a bunch of people have had this problem already.Whatever else you guys would want!
Members who donate would have some sort of icon or visual identifier in your posts showing that you are a donor to the site. To make you feel special of course!
Content wise there will probably not be anything special you can view as a donor unless there is demand for a donating members only section.
The purpose of this post is to gauge how much support there would be if I added this donation feature (and thus whether it would be worth it for me to spend time setting it up).
I may also look into a special category of donors for businesses and maybe there would be some advertising options, although I would shy away from doing a banner ad on every page. More likely it will be a tab at the top to a "Sponsors" page where your business would be listed.
I had planned on getting at least 500 members before making this post but several people have messaged me asking how they can help, so here it is.
Thanks to you all for making this forum a success!
:tiphat:
