We’ve held various Q&A sessions before on the support forum and they’ve always been a big help when it comes to answering user questions. Starting now, we will be accepting questions that will be answered on the blog once a week. These questions are non-support questions and should be directed towards finding out more about FreeForums.org or our staff. A few example questions would be:

Q) Did you ever think FreeForums.org would be this popular?
Q) Why is everything orange?
Q) How many people does it take to run FreeForums.org?

Questions can be sent via email to support@freeforums.org with the subject “Blog Questions”.

With the continued work on our phpBB3 system taking up the majority of our development time some users have emailed us asking if we even care of receiving feedback.

Before we get started I’d like to make it clear that we not only value user feedback, we thrive on it. Our great success today is in part due to the innovative ideas that come through our users. Having said that, if you’re a user on the support forum the feedback you see is in some ways deceiving.

We have over 10 Million active users on our network of forums, compared to just 8,000 on the support forum that posted in our feedback board. That means 0.001% of our total users are actually on the support forum offering feedback, a very small number indeed. To put that in perspective even more that’s like speaking to 100,000 users and hearing feedback from 1 person. It also so happens that the most active forums and users aren’t the ones leaving feedback on the support forum. It tends to be the forums just starting up rather than the already established ones.

So how do we gauge feedback? The best way we can: Data. We collect huge amounts of data that we use to determine which features people actually use and like. We use this data not only to improve on existing features, but also new ones we’re looking to offer.

Some of our most successful features (ie. Community Chest and Welcome box) have taken a hit on the support forum by a few lone users, although we were able to see by the data that they were highly welcomed by the masses.

In the end, next time you see 10 users asking for a feature or complaining about something on the support forum don’t be so quick to assume all users hold those views. We will watch closely and if the voices are in tune with the masses, we will take action. What we won’t do is let a group of vocal users make the decisions felt by millions.

As administrators, sometimes we can get a little too bogged down by the actual management of the forums, i.e. the stuff that happens behind the scenes and keeps the community running smoothly and on track. This aspect of our job is very, very important and should not be neglected.

However, an important part of running your forums is being visible on them. You want your members to know you. Be human, be involved – joke around, have fun if it’s in your nature and allow others to have fun – within your guidelines. Allowing your members to become familiar with you gives them the opportunity to see you as a real person and not just as an authority figure or a machine. This can lead to them being more responsive to you and respectful of you.

This goes for your staff members, as well. Part of being a staff member is participating. Your staff members should generally be ideal members before you invite them to join your team. And, once they come on board, they should continue to set an example that all members can follow through their own respectful, productive and kind participation.

There’s no doubt that the moving and removing of posts (as well as other, general administrative functions) is vital to the success of your forums, but you and your staff can do tremendous amounts of good by setting trends, showing people how to act and what your community is all about. Being a leader isn’t just about pushing buttons behind the scenes – it’s also about being a leader where everyone can see you.

————————————-
Patrick O’Keefe is the author of “Managing Online Forums: Everything You Need to Know to Create and Run Successful Community Discussion Boards”. He blogs at ManagingCommunities.com.

Some forum owners ask what exactly “Adult Content / Obscene Content” means in our content policy. In order to protect the integrity of our advertisers (which allow this service to be free) we require all forums to contain family friendly content and appropriate for all audiences.

While not a sure test, asking questions such as: Would I be comfortable showing this content to my kids or parents? Would I be comfortable viewing this content if my boss walked up beside me? If you answered “no” to either of these questions chances are our advertisers wouldn’t be comfortable running ads on your content.

Checking with us first is a safer alternative to having your forum removed without warning.

Hey everyone. I’m a new addition to the team here, and just wanted to introduce myself.

My name is Aaron, and I have been working with Cero on various other projects for the past 6 years. I have several years of experience working on web applications, having worked in PHP, ASP 3.0, ASP.NET, alongside the front end XHTML, CSS, and Javascript.

I’ve been brought on to be a developer. That is, to help add new features, or to fix any issues with existing ones. While I still have to get familiar with how things are run here, I hope to quickly adapt to become a valued member of the FreeForums team, and be as helpful to all of you as I can be.

Since July 21, focus shifted at FreeForums in the way we thought and went about seeing our future. We wanted to make sure that what happened that night could never happen again. At the same time, we were seeing problems brewing in the air.

Database Clusters
Due to the rate at which FreeForums was growing and the limitations of MySQL replication, we saw ourselves running into a very severe road block. To maintain our MySQL servers, at the time we had one master MySQL server and several slave servers. All writes would go to the MySQL master which would then be synchronized to the MySQL slaves which all reads went to.

The problem we saw was that MySQL replication, on the slaves, was only capable of using a single CPU core to process updates coming from the master. To handle the operation of replication, the master server needed use of all its cores, yet each slave could only use one. Eventually we would hit a wall at 100% usage of the core and thus be unable to process any more updates. The result from this: slaves would fall out of sync.

Our solution to this was to break FreeForums up into multiple independent MySQL clusters. This would distribute writes over serveral master servers and allow us to add even more slave servers. But writing a system for this would not be easy and would take some extensive testing and development.

All the while we were developing this new system, we began hitting the writing bottleneck on our slaves. Throughout December, we were having slaves fall out of sync whenever there was high traffic hitting our web servers; however, thanks to the holidays, we were given two weeks of lower traffic which gave us more time to test and develop the system. Come January, however, that went away and for the entire first week and a half, slaves were out of sync every day from 11AM thru 7PM.

Given the obviousness that we were out of time, we halted testing of the second cluster system and launched it. The tests had been going well, and we wanted to continue testing a few more things to make certain that the system would work as expected, but we were out of time. On the morning of January 15, while watching Cluster-0 slaves fall out of sync at 6AM, I decided that we had to launch the system immediately. At that time, we picked 39 databases accounting for 20% of our daily traffic and sent them to the new cluster.

Low and behold, the Cluster0 slaves synced back up, and since that date we haven’t had a single slave fall out of sync. At this time, we have finished testing and development of the clustering system and will be using it from now on. The addition of clustering was a huge step forward for us as it will guarantee the speed and stability of FreeForums in the coming years.

Web Servers
The second problem we were already facing was that we needed a more stable environment to serve the websites that we were hosting. We had multiple web servers, but the way in which we were load balancing them was by the use of round robin. Round robin is a method where in your DNS records, used by the Internet to look up where your website is located, you list multiple IP addresses. When you type in your web address, your computer randomly selects from that pool of IP addresses and that is the server you land on. Problem here is that there is no load distribution and there is no failover protection.

Those two issues would spell chaos as FreeForums grew. Even though we had three web servers, one of them was receiving 50% of all traffic with the other two receiving 25% each. Next, what would happen if, say, the web server receiving 50% of traffic would go down? The answer is simple: 50% of viewers wouldn’t be able to access the forums they were trying to view.

The solution to this was simple, in theory; however, it would take time to test and develop. Consulting with SoftLayer network engineers, we were directed to look at the Zeus ZXTM Load Balancer. Zeus ZXTM is a software suit that distributes requests for various TCP and UDP services based on specifications that you set for it.

What Zeus ZXTM would give us is a level of stability and redundancy on our web servers that has never been seen before my FreeForums.org and its users. By sending all requests to the Zeus ZXTM load balancing server, we are able to evenly distribute all requests over all web servers as well as redirect requests when a web server goes offline. This will make it impossible for a failed web server to ever be noticed by our viewers again.

As of January 26, all viewers are accessing FreeForums.org by way of the Zeus ZXTM load balancer, and we couldn’t be happier.

The Future
FreeForums.org is well on its way to making all points of service HA (high availability) by making every single service redundant with backup servers, but we still have a ways to go before we achieve this.

First, the global MySQL servers used to house the data shared between all clusters, while having a slave keeping mirrored copy of the data, is still setup in a Master+Slave method. Should the master go down, a human will need to convert the slave to a master server. The solution to this is to utilize MySQL Cluster, which allows for all servers in the mix to be masters. Once this is done, if the primary server ever goes down the others can take over immediately without anyone needing to intervene.

Next, the file storage server is currently standalone. There is no failover, there is no mirror. Just backups being made every fifteen minutes. But, aha!, yet another easy fix. We will be looking into using the Lustre File System as a means to create several file servers which act as one unified server. Should a server ever fail, go offline, or do anything that makes it unavailable, all requests to that server will be directed to the others. No one would ever know the difference.

Lustre is based off Sun Microsystem’s ZFS, a very powerful and robust filesystem. Lustre is currently in use by several of the world’s largest supercomputers, hosting hundreds of millions of files totaling petabytes in total space. So we’re confident that it can handle our humble hundreds of thousands of files.

Many more changes are coming in the future, and things are sure to be very exciting as we move into the future.

Lets face it, when was the last time you searched on Google or Yahoo? 2 hours ago? 30 minutes? Just like these search engines can provide you with information on your favorite movie, they can also provide you with free traffic to your forum.

This is the reason behind our recent forum optimization project. Due to the overwhelming amount of content, poor link structure, and session issues, forums tend to preform worse than normal websites in search engines. Having said that, with some key optimizations and upgrades you can make those issues a thing of the past.

Thanks to a mod from phpBB SEO, as well as some in house modifications, we were able to make some key adjustments across the network which will help search engines better crawl and index your content. The result? You should see more of your pages indexed and thus more people coming to your forum.

As always, the best way to get people to your forum is through quality content. Below we’ve listed a few tips to help put search to work for you:

1) Edit your META tags - We have a custom mod in your admin panel that lets you edit your META tags. Editing these can help search engines understand what your forum is about.
2) Use a targeted header - Instead of naming your forum “The best forum ever” consider naming it “Forums for Wrestling and WWE Fanatics”
3) Be descriptive - Try to encourage your members to be more descriptive when posting a topic. Instead of “Cool thing I found” have them make the subject “Seagate Readies New Hard Drive Technology”.
4) Link to your forum - Relevant sites linking to yours not only bring a lot of traffic, but can also help with search engine.
5) Be patient - Traffic from search isn’t going to come in the first few weeks or months. It may take time but it will be worth the long term results you reap.

When we launched our Ad-Sharing update which made sponsors default on all forums, we promised the revenue would “allow us to improve on the already high level of services”. We’re pleased to say that we’ve done just that:

We’ve run into a few problems over the past few months with web servers going down here and there. This was caused by an uneven distribution in load caused by using Round robin to balance the traffic. Round robin randomly selects from a pool of IP addresses and that is the server you land on. Problem here is that there is no load distribution and there is no failover protection.

The solution to this was simple, in theory; however, it would take time to test and develop and a lot of money to purchase the equipment. After consulting various network engineers, we looked into the Zeus ZXTM Load Balancer. Zeus ZXTM is a software suit that distributes requests for various TCP and UDP services based on specifications that you set for it.

What Zeus ZXTM would give us is a level of stability and redundancy on our web servers that has never been seen before by FreeForums.org and its users. By sending all requests to the Zeus ZXTM load balancing server, we are able to evenly distribute all requests over all web servers as well as redirect requests when a web server goes offline. This will make it impossible for a failed web server to ever be noticed by our viewers.

We made the final purchase this past Tuesday and all viewers are accessing FreeForums.org by way of the Zeus ZXTM load balancer. We couldn’t be happier

As you probably know by now, we recently launched a blog hosting service. One of the main features (and what makes it’s 100% unique from other blogging platforms) is your blog will share members with your forum. If a member registers on your forum they can use the same login for your blog, and vice versa.

Blogs are a great resource for building your community as they allow you to interact with your user. You can use blogs to post news about your community, share articles you found, or allow key members and staff to post as well.

What are you waiting for? If you already have a forum, you can go to your Community Control Panel and enable a blog. Your login was emailed to you with the subject “Your Community Control Panel login”. Additionally, if you want a personal blog or something not connected to your forum you can go to UnrealBlogs.com and create a new one.

We’ve found blogging to be a blast, and you will too

At FreeForums.org, our responsibility goes beyond providing you with the very best in forum hosting. Making sure your forum is as active as possible is also in our job description. These are a few things we have done to help you build members:

1) New Register page - After extensive market research we found the default registration page to be a daunting sight to those unfamiliar with the forum signup process. In order to help speed up the registration process we removed some of the unneeded options and Profile Configuration settings. While this was actually done last month most forum owners have no reason to visit the register page and may not have even noticed!

2) Forum Toolbar - Your forum toolbar is perhaps one of the best ways to increase activity on your forum. When your members install the toolbar, they are constantly reminded of your forum when browsing the web. To install this toolbar go to yourforum.freeforums.org/toolbar.php (replace ‘yourforum’ with your domain name). You can configure it with other features via the “Toolbar” link in your admin panel.

3) Freedom - The numerous features we offer give you the freedom to create a forum just how you want it.

4) Brandable forum - FreeForums.org was the first forum host to popularize the non-branded forum by giving you the option to use an external domain (yourdomain.com) and remove the “Host by FreeForums.org” at the bottom. This lets you brand your own forum and lose the “free hosting” label.

5) Coming soon - Over the coming weeks we will be rolling out some new features and services that we’ve been working on since September. These services will provide more value to your members ensuring they spend more time on your forum!