Lame Compliment

[Help Desk]

Excellent site. There seems to be a lot less whining, flaming and SPAM than most other forums out there.

[respree]

All forums attract those elements. To the extent that you don't see it, you can be certain its the 'management.' =)

[schlottke]

Shawn seems to control the problem areas very well. He seems to have a natural ability to control the forums- unlike some *COUGH*WMW*COUGH*. wno need constant monitoring ;)

[TechEvangelist]

Ditto. I recently moved here from most of those other forums. I got tired or weeding though the dribble. I see more relevant questions and answers here.

[digitalpoint]

It's mostly because if anyone gets out of hand, I don't ban or delete their posts, I simply drive to their house and beat them. :)

[Help Desk]

Nice response!

What is the reason behind not posting a link to the forums from www.digitalpoint.com? Just curious.

I just came across your keyword tools. They are Jaw-dropping good!

Lastly, after thumbing around Google, you may be the only one that share's Adsense revenue. Most places must never think about doing that. Administrator's first reactions must be to keep all the revenue for him or herself. Being open and sharing like this breeds a great community and provides some great content. I am seriously considering publishing a phpBB mod that would do the same for all that use that type of forum. You don't have a patent out on that yet do you? ;)

Let me know if you ever start selling stock in digitalpoint.com!

[digitalpoint]

There is a link from www.digitalpoint.com to the forums actually. :)

As far as the AdSense revenue sharing, I don't know of anyone else doing it, but I imagine there will be some "copycats" doing it at some point. Hopefully it doesn't become so abused that Google alters their terms of service to prohibit it.

[Help Desk]

I see the link now. I was looking for it on the main side-menu.

Google seems to be a pretty open company. If the advertisers are happy with their results, then I don't see Google having a problem with it.

I can see many forums will be doing this too. Imitation is the highest form of flattery you know.

[digitalpoint]

I know... I've had numerous forum owners ask me to do it in their forum. And also probably 10 or so tell me that they had the idea before me, but now they are going to do it (I'm guessing they just wanted an excuse to not look like a copy cat). :)

I'll probably release the hack to do it for vBulletin when everyone and their brother has it already... but might as well keep it exclusive for a little while at least. ;)

[Help Desk]

The best way to keep things under-used is to sell it! I've seen the same thing happen to Mod-Rewrite. Selling it really curbs the spread. Plus you can always give it away later after people start calling you a "penny-pinching Bill Gates wanna-be"! :)

[digitalpoint]

Hahaha... nah, I'm not trying to sell it to anyone. :)

Would almost be an embarrassment to sell it because it's about 4 lines total of code. And not even in the source code files. (Which is nice because it will carry forward on an upgrade without having to redo anything).

[NewComputer]

Lastly, after thumbing around Google, you may be the only one that share's Adsense revenue. Most places must never think about doing that.

I agree, it should almost be an MLM where the ads get rotated for those who were here first and hit 50, get rotated the most. I love the idea of doing this. Not sure the benefits, maybe some could tell me so far their experience after 50. This forum is great. I was a long time poster over at WMW and have not posted there once since I found this board.

I will hopefully help do my part to make this bigger than WMW. It is already better, so that has been accomplished. This is what a board should be. kudos!

[digitalpoint]

That was my original plan... basically to rotate the ads based on total posts randomly throughout the forum (the more posts, the more insertions you get). The problem with that was it was just too many slow SQL queries to scale in any sort of realistic fashion.

The first "version" of it only credited the person starting the thread because it didn't tear down the backend database with queries.

The latest version credits the poster within the thread, when you view their post, so it works well I think. Requires a single (fast) SQL query, so it will scale. Also it's a big more fair than someone getting credit on threads they didn't participate in. Someone could have a single post that no one reads, and it would count the same as a post that was read 5,000 times if it was done that way. So in it's current form, popular threads/posts are rewarded based on how many people are reading/interested in them.

[NewComputer]

With your 1200+ posts, you would be rich ;) I think it is great. I assume that the bugs are worked out. So, if you post a thread, the ads are served on your behalf, and if you post in the topic you don't receive credit, correct? Just want to make sure that I am clear, if my ads start to go and I have no idea why, I would like to know whether it was because I posted or started a thread. Thanks again. Where do we make suggestions for additional topics we would like to see?

[digitalpoint]

It works either way. A thread can be viewed two different ways...

By thread... for example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=816 If it's viewed by thread, then the thread starter gets credit.

A thread can also be viewed by post. For example: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?p=7509#post7509 If it's viewed by post (which is the more common way of viewing them, because that's what's used when you view new/unread or latest), then the poster of that specific post get credit.

[Help Desk]

Is there a way to see how many times one's posts has been viewed? A view/post ratio might show one the quality of their posts.

[digitalpoint]

No, the system does not log individual posts, just the thread as a whole.

[DarrenC]

Okay thinkbling ya money grabbin Microsoft lover tell me how to do mod rewrite :D

I've got the .htaccess file so it shows the dynamic URL in .html but want to show it on the site so that when someone does a search, they see the results, but in .html not PHP.

I need it answering in English, not technical nerd talk :)

Darren

[Help Desk]

Okay thinkbling ya money grabbin Microsoft lover tell me how to do mod rewrite :D...

It's true. Money is GOOD!

So you want to change a request to ABC.htm to XYZ.php?Parameter=123.

The first thing that you have to come up with is a schema. Compare...
ThinkBling.com (http://www.thinkbling.com) to static.ThinkBling.com (http://static.ThinkBling.com).

For a more precise example we will take the "Computer Add-Ons" listing.
The normal page is...
"http://www.thinkbling.com/list.php?Category=electronics&Keywords=%20&SearchType=Node&Node=172455"
Actual Link (http://www.thinkbling.com/list.php?Category=electronics&Keywords=%20&SearchType=Node&Node=172455)

and the static page is...

"http://static.thinkbling.com/list_Category_electronics_Keywords_%20_SearchType_Node_Node_172455.htm"
Static Link (tp://static.thinkbling.com/list_Category_electronics_Keywords_%20_SearchType_Node_Node_172455.htm)

A request for on static.thinkbling.com takes the filename and divides it by the underscores ("_") into its parts.
Part 1 = "list"
Part 2 = "Category"
Part 3 = "electronics"
Part 4 = "Keywords"
Part 5 = "%20"
Part 6 = "SearchType"
Part 7 = "Node"
Part 8 = "Node"
Part 9 = "172455"

It then makes an internal call to...
(Part 1).php?(Part 2)=(Part 3)&(Part 4)=(Part 5)&(Part 6)=(Part 7)&(Part 8)=(Part 9)
or translated...
list.php?Category=electronics&Keywords=%20&SearchType=Node&Node=172455

All links on "static.thinkbling.com" are made different than the ones at the normal "thinkbling.com".

Is that too technical?

[Help Desk]

I've been playing around with making a mod for phpBB so that those forums can have ad revenue sharing. Modding phpBB is an extreme pain! Did it really only take you a few lines of code in vbulletin?

[digitalpoint]

Yep, and without touching a single PHP file or altering the table structure either. :)

[debunked]

Yep, and without touching a single PHP file or altering the table structure either. :)

This is because Shawn is very good at what he does. (All Shawns fall in this catagory, right?!)

He is like an interpreter, very fluent in the language. I bet he dreams in 1's and 0's, or #fffff, etc.
:eek:

[digitalpoint]

That's true too... :) For a living, I build very large/complex commercial software packages, I don't do SEO or web design or anything like that as a job.

But I have administered phpBB forums as well, and it's infinitely more difficult to hack phpBB to do things (and then you have to redo them on an upgrade, which I hated).

[Help Desk]

vBulletin is realatively expensive. If it was cheaper a lot more people would be all over it! Hopefully phpBB 2.2 will be much better, although who knows when that will be. ...then again, "You get what you pay for".

[digitalpoint]

Relative to free, anything is expensive. :)

Don't get me wrong, I think phpBB is awesome, especially for the price. But vBulletin really isn't all that expensive (a $160 one-time cost isn't terrible).

And truthfully, before vBulletin 3, it wasn't worth the cost. phpBB was "good enough". But vBulletin 3.0 really took everything to a whole new level (especially the administration/backend). So for me, the $160 cost was well worth the time saved hacking on phpBB trying to get it to do things that either vB does out of the box (like spider friendly).

[Help Desk]

I apologize for this thread taking a different turn. It doesn't quite fit in the Suggestions section.

How is vBulletin's import? Is there a migration path from phpBB to vB?

[digitalpoint]

Yep... it's automatic. SEO Guy's forum started with phpBB and moved to vBulletin without any problems (and so did SEO Chat) as an example. It's able to suck in everything (forums, posts, users, etc.)

Coding is something I know a LOT (I can't stress that enough) about. And I'm also not quick to give my personal recommendation/blessing to something either. But in the case of vBulletin, it's without a doubt THE cleanest, object oriented, easiest to work with piece of software I have ever run across. You can't appreciate it at all until you see the admin/backend (I only wish I saw it sooner).

[Foxy]

Of that you have now convinced me.

I have the phpbb forums already installed but I am going to move across - you see it in the results of the search engines :D