A year anniversary!
1 Year anniversary image by @SimpelPlant (twitter) Who did a fantastic job as always.
I hope everyone has had a nice Halloween and scared themselves watching horror films.
The forum has been live for one year as of the 2nd November.
I'll front-load the usual end of post stuff here as well since its going to be a long one.
Thank you to everyone for being on the site and using it over this past year, I hope you all have had a great time with it so far and continue to do so.
Please consider donating to the site if you are able as it helps out a ton, and share the site with those you think would enjoy its content or would like to express their passion for their hobbies here!
Informational blog-posts on federated messaging via XMPP and micro-blogging on the fediverse are in the works. I think that they are good for the web, so any sort of help I can give those platforms will be good.
Community Feedback and Input
I'd like to get people more involved in doing things if they would like to, it is a bit sparse for the time being, but there is now the Community Resource Page for all of your
If you have any ideas of things that you would like to see please raise it in the Community Feedback Thread, all feedback is subject to my ability to act on it 😉
Its been difficult and interesting using different sites advertising and methods for getting the sites reach further.
Advertising
Over the course of the year, I have tried a few different avenues for getting the site out there.
To me, Self service has been the most important thing, Being able to directly pay site A to advertise my site on Site A.
Avenues
4Chan
As i'm sure most of you are aware, 4chan is the most popular imageboard and imo, has the best self serve ads.
I think it has the best clarity, click-through rate and variations possible. I run the most ad campaigns here.
SomethingAwful
SomethingAwful is an interesting place with a long history. A rare pay-to-use forum with a broad appeal. They do a nice simple 'pay $30 for a banner to be in the list for a month'. Nice and simple. I don't know if anyone joined the site based on my ads on there, but I don't mind occasionally putting an ad up on there.
Reddit
Reddit had a deal on where you could get $200 of free credit for signing up with their ads. So I did. I only ended up running the ads for about 5 days, in that time about $120 of which was the free credit, but what they didn't clearly state, was that the ad credit was only available for I think 3 days after making the account. So it was charging me before i'd hit $200, much to my dismay.
The ad stats weren't especially good and 1 day was quite expensive (about $70-$90). From what I can guess, nobody signed up to the site from Reddit.
Google
Google search ads are the default type of ads that businesses and those online will tell you to use, because they were good in the past.
Search engines aren't used as much as they used to be and Google knows it, "offering" ads on other platforms and altering the form.
From what I can tell, I don't think the forum actually showed up in a search result at all as an ad. From what I could see in the logs they let you access, it seemed to be text ads on YouTube mostly. Which was not what I was paying for.
Twitter (X)
Twitter has been an interesting one, and I've had to think of it differently. So for most of the advertising I've been focused on site visits.
For Twitter though, there is that, but its also more about reach and getting that in a better spot. Twitter ads don't seem to be too bad money wise. Its strange though because I do essentially have to use the twitter account a bit more like a standard social media, at least in the way i'm seeing.
There is a whole thing about trying to divvy up time for each thing appropriately and I do try, so hopefully I don't get too carried away.
Only real issue IMO with twitter ads, I "targeted" the USA with a promoted tweet, only for 99% of interactions to be from Vietnam... wasn't the USA last I checked.
Costs
As I am sure you can imagine at this point, I have spent a quite large amount of money over the course of the year. This has been worthwhile for the most part as I think I have had a learning experience with advertising over the year.
In advertising, I have spent £2120 over this year. It does hurt to see the total just on advertising ;(, but I varied between £80-200 per month on ads. I just had to avoid buying stuff on eBay and it wasn't too bad. This cost does not include the server and web domain costs for the site.
As some are aware, I did look at various ways to monetise the site, there was a brief stint where google ads were enabled on the site, but it didn't pay well and left me with a sick taste in my mouth. I would only consider direct partnerships or self serve ads on the site. Over this year I have gained a general distaste for advertising agencies and such. Any agencies wanting to change this perception can let me know how they are different.
Site Stats
As it has been a year since the site has been live, It is good to reflect on the statistics for the year.
Below is the graph for activity if you are interested in seeing it
Users:
Discussions:
Posts:
I have been mostly happy with the activity. Its been an enlightening experience working on the site and thinking in a statistics mindset. Site activity has varied from a bit quiet, nice and chatty, and quite busy.
I hope to see site activity increase over time, however I am patient 🙂
A look at the future
I have not been as free to work on things lately as I wanted to be, but there are some things still in the works.
I am working (slowly) toward getting the PWA cleaned up a bit and getting a new sheep logo sorted. I would like to, but we'll see... Get the site on app stores as an app. I will have to look at security though, any web based apps where they are essentially chromium mixed with the site can be risky as they have to be updated frequently like the browser itself.
The forum software is being rewritten by the developers. I imagine Flarum 2.0 will be better in some ways, worse in others. But that may have some form of release next year. Until the features of the new version are sufficient, I will likely stay on 1.0.
I'd like to get some desired features implemented over the next year, however my IRL job seems like its going to be busy for the foreseeable future. So I cant give a date sadly.
Wapchan.org is a friend site of the forum, I hope to get a little list of sites like it that we are mutual friends with. Feel free to suggest any sites as per the rules.
If you would like to tell people you know who may like the site, feel free to do so
A huge thank you
It has been a good year for me I think. Busy IRL and also quiet other times. I hope that the site has been helpful for many of you in the same way it has been for me.
A double thank you to the donators of the site, it means the world to me.
Heres to another year of the forum!
I can't think of what else I wanted to cover, I shouldve planned better
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