As a forum admin, nothing is more frustrating than having your forum spammed to bits. Whether it’s our zero tolerance policy against spammers, proprietary spam prevention systems, or our actively monitored abuse email account, we strive to delete spam before it gets on your plate. We have a goal of removing all automated spam from our network, and have developed proprietary systems that let you enjoy a less spammy diet.

Our systems are so effective that it’s not uncommon for a forum to move off freeforums.org and get bombed with spam the minute they leave. Little is known about our anti-spam systems, and while the technical side is a trade secret (we don’t want the spammers to read this) just know that we are constantly maintaining and updating it to block the most recent spam tactics.

Spam is something that happens and no real way around it. What does matter is how your host handles it.

I’ve mentioned before that it’s our job not only to offer the best forums, but also provide the best resources and tools for people to use. Below are some great resources you may or not know about. Using them when possible will help you find fast answers and solutions to problems:

Knowledge Base
Perhaps the easiest way to find answers to questions or problems, our knowledge base is used by thousands of forum owners a day. It’s such a valuable resources for forums in general it’s used a lot by non-freeforums.org customers. It’s constantly being updated with information so keep checking back regularly!

Support Forum
Our new support forum might be the most obvious on this list, but most people could benefit from using it more. Contrast to popular belief, our support forum is not just for support. Our active community of staff and customers create a nice environment to get help with other subjects as well. It’s the perfect place to advertise your forum, offer feedback and suggestions, learn about upcoming news and issues, request a style to be installed and more!

Recovery Console
The recovery console is a great place to restore your forum after harmful changes. You can unpark a parked domain, view an admin log, and access your “root admin” (a hidden admin account always on your forum). You can also pay $15/6 months to get backup and restoring of your forum.

Social Networks
Did you know that FreeForums.org was on Facebook & Twitter? Add us up it’s a great way to keep informed about our service and also advertise your forum for free!

As you can see we offer quite a few resources that can help your forum, all for free. We look forward to providing even more ways to help our forum admins build their forums.

As our customers know, July & August were huge months for us development wise. In just two months, we made more improvements and installed more features than most hosts install in a years time. Our constant upgrades are a big reason why we’re so far ahead of our competition. Just two months ago we promised five huge improvements were coming this summer. These weren’t small mods that would take a day to install, this were core changes. I’m happy to say that we’re ahead of schedule and already completed four, plus many other exciting features. Here’s an inside look at the coming upgrades:

Free Upgrades — Everyone wants a domain name, and a premium forum, but not everyone is able to pay for it. Coming this month we will allow admins and their users to fill out offers by our sponsors and receive free upgrades.

Forum Directory – This will be a great way to not only find other interesting forums, but also to get users for your forum. Within a few weeks we plan to release a directory with some of the forums freeforums.org hosts. While this directory is limited to really active forums, and premium forums, anyone can purchase premium and get a listing.

Core Network Upgrades – Coming around the 23rd of this month we will be upgrading all three web servers to the latest, more powerful hardware. We will also start upgrading every mysql database server. The result will be even faster page loading and more reliability.

Backup Optimizing – No one would disagree that backups are important. At FreeForums.org, we have one of the most advanced backup systems available. Next week will be removing deadweight files and forums to help optimize the process. This, coupled with the network upgrades mentioned above will highly reduce the slowness some forums see early in the more during the backups.

Knowledge Base Refresh – Our knowledge base is one of the premier help resources for phpBB forums. It’s used by thousands of forum admins per day (a lot use other hosts) and contains a lot of valuable information on starting, managing, and improving your forum. We plan to do a huge refresh this month adding even more content.

As you can see the FreeForums.org team is dedicated towards keeping our service #1, and have quite a bit of work ahead.

If you’ve ever posted a question on our support forum, you’re likely to get helped by one of our volunteer support staff. These users have volunteered their time to help others with questions and problems regarding our service. We only hire the best, most knowledgeable people to ensure our support is top notch. Although we get 10-20 applications a month from those wanting to join our team,  little is known about what we look for when hiring. Below are a few specifics we want in support staff:

• Activity
  It goes without saying that we only want the most active staff. Staff should enjoy helping users and be around to post 10+ times a day.
  
• Knowledge/Quality
  It’s important that staff are well informed and experienced with all of the freeforums.org features and services. This should be reflected in their quality support posts. We’re not looking for people to be correct 100% of the time (we’re all human) but being able to give accurate answers most of the time is needed.
• Politeness
  On the support forum we deal with a lot of users, most are having some kind of problem. When was the last time you called up your Internet provider and told them how much you enjoy their service? Exactly…probably never. The same is true on the support forum. Even though we’re a 100% free service, and we pay a lot out-of-pocket to provide free forums, users expect the best. Being able to work with these users without blowing up is key
• Dedication
  Being loyal and dedicated to FreeForums.org and our community is huge. We need staff who will stick with us through anything, the good or the bad. Who will always put the community first, and remember that the whole purpose is to have fun!
  

Overall the support team is a great way to improve yourself as a person while providing a service to others. As a huge provider of forums we’re great on resumes, and for building your professional skills. If you’re interested in applying please read our application topic!

Most forum hosts have one goal in mind: offering good forums. At FreeForums.org we take that a step further and not only have the best forums, but we also have a goal of helping you (the admin) make your forum as active as possible. By installing user retention mods like the chat box, arcade, welcome PM, and the inactive user reminder, we help look after both admins and users. We try hard not only to make sure you have what you need as an admin, but we try even harder to make sure your users have what they need to keep participating. After all, without users forums are dead. Through our hard work it has paid off, and I’m here to share some stats with you straight from the FreeForums.org lab:

In the past five months we’ve increased active forums by over 50%.

In this same time we have increased active forum users  by over 65%.

For a network as large as FreeForums.org this is a huge increase, and a testament to our hard work making sure we have the best forum platform both for both admins and users. Due to our high emphasis on user experiences and attention to detail when designing our forum hosting platform, when you host with FreeForums.org you have a greater chance of success than anywhere else.

So what’s in store for the future? We already released a few forum promotion articles and have more on the way. We also have a ton of new features we will roll out this summer that will help you increase the activity on your forum.

FreeForums.org utilizes several advanced technologies to bring its forum hosting platform to its viewers.

The Web Front

FreeForums utilizes the Zeus ZXTM Load Balancing software to distribute all incoming requests for forums across its Intel Xeon 5400 web servers. Zeus provides us with a seamless way to distribute requests and handle down web servers without causing interruption to the viewers.

All incoming requests land at the Zeus ZXTM server. Zeus then selects a backend web node to serve the request based on the current load of each node and historical data to suggest which node has the most available processing power. In the event that a node is unreachable, it is removed from the pool and all requests are redirected to another node. This happens without the viewer ever knowing there was a problem.

All customer data is distributed across several MySQL storage servers each utilizing Intel Xeon 5400 CPUs and eight-disk, 15000RPM, SAS RAID arrays. This distribution ensures that problems with any one server will not affect other servers and also provides for adequate power across the entire network.

Usage of Memcached

Reducing the read/write load on our MySQL servers has been a continuing struggle for us. To help us achieve our goals, we utilized Memcached.

Using memcached, we are able to store stats, configuration data, and more into the memory of our web servers. Doing this prevents us from having to access the MySQL disks more often and results in pages loading faster. A perfect example: The Ajax chat system runs entirely within Memcached. Without Memcached, the Ajax chat system cannot work as it causes too much load on the MySQL servers.

Backup System

FreeForums.org has a lot of data (and I mean a lot of data). Each MySQL server has well over 20 million files on its filesystem. Every customer also has their own attachments folder full of its own files. To make backups of all this data has never been easy. At first we utilized rsync to send manual backups to our backup server, but that proved to be time consuming, slow, and unreliable.

Enter our backup system. Our backup system is an automated backup solution which provides us with point-in-time backups of all our data with easy point-click file restorations. It runs continuously and has helped us many times in the past to recover lost data.

Our global MySQL server, support board, and fileserver get backed up every 15 minutes and maintain over two weeks of checkpoints. This means that we can choose which version of a file we wish to restore from over the past two weeks. Our MySQL data servers are backed up once per day and also maintain two weeks of checkpoints.

While both our Premium Service and Advanced Hosting allow you to take your forum to the next level, they do vary quite a bit:

Premium Service
- Your forum is still with FreeForums.org
- Allows you to have more features for your forum
- Costs $4.94/month OR $49.50/year

Advanced Hosting
-  We will move your forum for free to our advanced partner
- Lets you install any mods or styles you want via FTP
- No ads on advanced hosting plus you can host unlimited forums & websites
- Costs $8.95/month OR $66.77/year

In the end it depends on what your goals are for your forum. If you want your same exact forum with more features, go premium. If you want to host a website with your ad-free forum or install mods on your forum then go advanced.

We’ve noticed a few common misconceptions going around about phpBB3 or our service, and I thought I would take a few minutes to clear them up. I now present to you: FreeForums.org myths debunked!

MYTH 1: “You get what you pay for” and since freeforums.org is free it must suck.
FreeForums.org has a more secure and robust network than many paid hosts. It’s free because we choose to make money off advertising instead of charging the hundreds of dollars a year we could otherwise charge for our service. We have a large team focused exclusively on keeping your forum online and just have to need it, but if you’re still having doubts just ask our users!

MYTH 2: “The 99.9% uptime you promise is not accurate”
The 99.9% uptime we advertise refers to the uptime across our entire network, which includes webservers, database servers, backup servers, and more — as a whole. If a single server is temporarily offline, the rest of the FreeForums.org network remains online and unaffected, thus contributing to our overall uptime. Occasionally, there will be some slowness on a server if there is an abuser; however, we quickly find them and disable that forum.

MYTH 3: “Because we’re a hosted solution we doesn’t provide as much freedom”
The FF (Free Forum) System actually provides more freedom than a traditional phpBB. Our users often find it hard to go back to a traditional phpBB install because they lose all the features we have.

MYTH 4: “Moving from phpBB2 to phpBB3 was a mistake, I liked v2 better”
Like anything new, it takes awhile before you’re as good with phpBB3 as you were with phpBB2. Having said that, almost all users have grown to love phpBB3 and could never go back. If that weren’t a good enough reason for phpBB3 to be on top, phpBB2 suffers from security issues that won’t be fixed since it’s no longer supported. The bottom line is phpBB2 is like Windows 98 — while it was good at the time we have since moved on to better.

MYTH5: “FreeForums.org is basic and doesn’t have any “Advanced” features”
FreeForums.org offers more features than any other host on the market. We constantly hear how much people love all the features and mods we provide them. In addition, we also offer the most upgrades out of any forum host. With our paid upgrades you can add tons of features and mods to your already advanced forum.

I hope this cleared up some confusions among new members. If you have any questions please let us know!

Since we launched our paid upgrades the custom domain upgrade as been by far the most popular upgrade. At only $15/year buying a custom domain for your forum can be a huge investment. Here’s five reasons your forum should have a custom domain:

1) Professionalism
Buying a domain is a cheap way to give your users the impression that you are for real. With a custom domain users have no way of knowing that you use a free service. For all they know you spent $1000s on your own servers.

2) Convenience
What’s easier, typing in yourdomain.com or yourdomain.freeforums.org? Exactly, a custom domain name is easier to remember and type , giving you a lot more “type in” traffic

3) Affordable
At just $15/year, $1.25/month, or $0.04 per day you can have a custom domain on your forum within minutes of buying it. For the small price it gives you quite a bit of value for your forum.

4) Search Engines
Custom domains do a lot better in search engines than a subdomain. If you want to add search traffic to your forum, purchase a custom domain!

5) Simple
Forget trying to find a register, editing nameservers, waiting for DNS to update, forgetting to renew your domain. When you buy a domain through FreeForums.org it will be live on your forum within two minutes!

You spend hours working on your forum, if someone told you for $15 you could get more members and make it more successful would you? Well, we just did. There you have it, Five Reasons to Buy a Domain. To purchase a domain click the “Upgrades” tab in your admin panel and select “Domain Name” for $15.

Last month I made a post sharing a few big projects we are working on. I wanted to detail the progress as well as other things coming up shortly:

Premium Service — Currently being finished we expect this release by the end of this coming week
Simple Admin Panel — Released last month, along with a new advanced style these have been a huge hit for improving the UI and functionality of the admin panel.
Make Money! — We’re currently exploring a few different options. We will most likely come out with a few ways forums can make money. Look for these late July/early August

New Projects:

New support forum — We will be upgrading the support forum to phpBB3, releasing a new skin, tons of mods and overall a much better community focused platform. FreeForums.org has one of the largest communities of forum admins on the Internet, and we plan to make it better.We will start on this around July 15th and finish it within 1-2 weeks.
Free Upgrades — Everyone wants a domain name, and a premium forum, but not everyone is able to pay for it. Coming mid July we will allow admins and their users to fill out offers by our sponsors and receive free upgrades.

As always we work hard to make sure you have the features you need to make a successful forum.