NASCAR-Forums.net was one of my original failing sites that I have decided to bring back to life. It will probably take a long time to get this one to take off, but it does have a couple good members that have taken an interest in it. It also has a few other things going for it.
Many People Love NASCAR
NASCAR is one of the most popular sports around and they all need a great place to talk about it. Since my Wife and I both love NASCAR, it shouldn’t be too hard for us to be regular participants. A forum that the owner doesn’t care about is doomed from the beginning. You never know, someday all of the members may meet at the races on a regular basis.
Great Software: vBulletin 3.7 beta 4
The site is running the newest beta of vBulletin. This new version of vBulletin has allowed me to remove many of the 3rd party hacks that I normally install in my forums. I believe this software gives me at least one advantage over the big dogs like NASCAR.com. With every NASCAR fan on the net (including myself) going to NASCAR.com on a regular basis, I need all the help I can get.
Time
I have all the time in the world. I am going to keep the site going just because I like it. Whether the site takes a month or ten years to get going, it doesn’t matter to me. I think I can get this site going and I think it’s going to take time.
That’s just a little update on NASCAR-Forums.net. If you like NASCAR stop by and say hello sometime. It really is a great place to talk NASCAR.
The name of the mod is “NoSpam! (an alternative to CAPTCHA images)”. CAPTCHA (Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart) is a way to stop bots from automatically entering your site and posting a bunch of spam. Like most technology, it has some bugs.
What is wrong with CAPTCHA?
There are three main problems with CAPTCHA that I can see.
- Everyone hates it. Looking at those swirly images boggles the mind.
- If you turn your CAPTCHA strength up too high, then nobody can figure it out anyways. You won’t have any bots or spam on your site, but you won’t have any humans or real content either.
- There are now programs designed to read the CAPTCHA images. With these programs, you can automate the registration process and spam whoever you want as much as you want.
What does NoSpam! do?
Let’s take a quote from antialiasis (author of this hack) on vBulletin.org.
It asks a question. Any question you want. That’s the best part: YOU make up the questions, which means that every forum is unique, which means that it is impossible for spambots to be simply programmed to bypass it at all forums with the hack installed. You can make one or many questions - if you make many, the hack will pick one at random when a guest attempts to register, search, post or send mail through the Contact Us form. Their input is compared with your specified answer, and voilĂ , if they get it right they’re pretty much guaranteed to be human. If they get it wrong, they’re given an error message.
NoSpam! has worked wonders on my site, I could never go without it. I use very simple questions (commands) on my site. An example, “Please type JUMP into the following box.” Another example, “3 + 7 = ?”. As you can see, the questions can be very simple and you can have as many of them as you like. Since I added this to my site, I have had zero spam registries.
NoSpam! + CAPTCHA = Perfection
I should mention that I use this in combination with the CAPTCHA images. However, I keep the CAPTCHA images set at a moderate level so they won’t scare away my potential members. If you would like to know more about NoSpam!, click the link below.
Download NoSpam! at vBulletin.org
In starting a forum I looked at a few different programs, some free and some not. When it really came down to choosing, I chose vBulletin. I chose vBulletin because a majority of the forums that I was a member of used vBulletin. vBulletin was the natural choice for me, I liked to use it as a member.
Complaints I have heard about vBulletin?
- The cost…$160
- While this may be expesive to some, it’s not to me.
- The admin panel is confusing.
- Take the time to familiarize yourself with. It took me about an hour to figure out what I needed to know. Everything else I learn as I go.
- There are too many features.
- Only use what you need. I don’t use many of the features. Many people use the features that I don’t.
There you go, I went through those real quick. Oh, I forgot the one about vBulletin providing terrible support. I have always recieved the correct answer to my question, from vBulletin staff, in less than 24 hours. If you don’t have that long, throw your question on the forums at vBulletin. Someone will help you out.
Why did you start with the complaints?
The complaints about vBulletin are very short and very easy to challenge. I started with the easy part. Now I need to tell you about the positives. This post could go on all day with postives, a few of them are listed below.
- Feature rich, but can be scaled down to your liking
- Great support
- Thousands of communities use it
- Huge group of third party developers (vBulletin.org)
- Powerful moderation tools
- and on and on…
I am very happy with vBulletin and have no plans of changing or even researching other software. Are there other good programs?…sure. It all depends on what you are looking for. If you are looking for high quality forum software that has great support and can do almost anything, then vBulletin is for you.
The Chalk Bucket is a gymnastics community powered by vBulletin. It started out as a natural extension of my gymnastics pro shop, Leotard Crazy. I just thought I would stick a message board on the site and people would start talking…I was wrong.
12 months and little to no activity.
I was under the impression that there are magical people on the internet that would come to the my forums and load them with high quality content. I built it…they did not come. I forgot about the whole project, just gave up on it. Shortly after 12 months with little activity I logged in and noticed that I did have one or two members that were very interested. At that point I new I could make it work, but I also knew it would take some work.
How did I get more members?
The Chalk Bucket is now about 18 months old and going strong. We are gaining great new members everyday. The posts are interesting and right on target with the subject matter. How did I get new members? I became one….I started taking a real interest in it. It has gone from something that I started to earn a living to something that (even though is earning very little right now) has great potential, something that I really care about.
Great story…how does that help me?
Ha…I love to talk. The Chalk Bucket is based on vBulletin. I have many hacks installed that are very important. I also have very specific SEO and advertising strategies that have been working with great success. Now we have the intro out of the way, we’ll start off with the basics tomorrow. If you have a forum (or want to start one) you’re going to find out how.
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