I'm glad you have a thick skin. That wasn't meant to say you are needy, just we should all work together and be honest. When I offer a negetive, I try to present a suggestion for change with it. The intent is to help. Your topic and interest in it are your positives and can carry you a long way. You have a nice style and color scheme in your templates. I should have noted that as well. Wishing you much success!
ok, so i've made some changes, way for the better, i like it alot already. i need your opinion on something else.....at first should i let people post as guests just to get them coming back? or should i get them registered? whats your feel on that?
I hate forums that let guests post because many times members think they are logged in and post yet they get no credit for the post. It is unfair to the forum and other members because they don't know who made the post if it is a member who forgot to log in. In addition you should not let folks post live links until they have 10 or more posts to keep spam posts down.
I hate it when I'm allways agreeing with ac, but I really hate this too. More so the more often I visit a forum. In other words, the "oldest" and busiest regulars get annoyed from it.
I would require registration for posting and use email confirmation for verification of registration. On the links thing, you may have to toloerate links as the nature of the beast from your users and allow it so they can show off their phones. I allow links at my sites only if it's to a MFGR, if it's to a dealer, I snip it. That's all I got for now.
Employ forum wizards Cherrybot & Mellabot. But it's a shame, they are not cheap. Shawn had to pay them big bucks to join here. Damn those AI bots.
Cherrybot seems to have gotten rusty and stopped working. Forums can be a very diffucult thing to keep in motion so I really admire anyone who has been able to keep them going for a long period of time.
I agree about the "no guest posting' advice -- these days that's just an invitation to trolls, flamers, and spammers. In addition to email verification, I would also strongly advise you to use visual verification (where the registrant has to copy a random series of letters and numbers to verify it's not a bot)... this will cut down on those auto-regsitrations from porn sites and cheap drug sites. Then, post some fascinating and topical and maybe controversial comments yourself -- this will invite people to respond, if only to disagree with you. Make Anthony a moderator -- this will get you about 400 posts per day Addendum Your "topics" page is a cute idea in some ways (the graphics for the cell phone companies linked to topics) but it might work better later when you have a more active forum -- for now, it looks rather like a page of ads for the companies.