We mentioned last month that we would soon be launching a premium service for forums. We’ve had a lot of interest in this and I’m going to answer some of the questions we’ve been getting.

Q) What will the Premium Service include?
A) The Premium Service will come with the Karma, Cash, and Shop mods, as well as a custom theme editor that will allow you to “create your own theme” by editing the colors of 10 existing themes. You will also receive full access to the Recovery Console (to backup and restore your forum in case of an emergency) and priority support (get answers to questions or problems sooner).

Q) How much will it cost?
A) The Premium Service will normally cost $6.95/month. However, we will initially launch with a promotion of $4.95/month and if you purchase then you will have that price for life.

Q) What if I want the premium features but can’t pay?
A) You will also be able to use Community Chest points, and our “Free Upgrades” program to pay for the premium service.

Q) So FreeForums.org is no longer free?
A) We will always remain 100% free. However, some users have expressed interest in paying money for features that we otherwise couldn’t release due to expensive development or upkeep costs. For those users, they can pay to have a Premium forum.

We are constantly being asked what we are working on next. Ever since we launched back in February of 2007 we have been at the top in terms of innovation and features. I would like to take a few minutes to discuess what we have in store for you, our customer:

Premium Service — In the coming weeks we will give you an option to purchase a “Premium Forum” for a small monthly cost. This will include additional features and mods not possible on the free system.
Simple Admin Panel — Lets face it, the phpBB3 admin panel wasn’t designed for non-tech savvy users. In the next two months we will be creating a simplified version of the admin panel that you can choose to use.
Make Money! — You put a lot of work into your forum because, like us, you are passionate about what you do. But who would complain about a little extra spending money for your time? Over this coming summer we will launch various ways of making money off your forum.
More Mods! — Can you ever have enough mods? We don’t think so either. With our new development cycle we’ve been releasing new mods in record time.

As always we will be working hard to bring you the very best tools and resources to run your community. If you would like to see anything added please let us know!

The FreeForums.org brand relieves heavily on user trust and experience. Because we wish for our services to be used by anyone, everything that exists on our network must contribute to the overall user experience, including advertising.

We’ve created some guidelines to help you communicate more effectively with your members, and so our partners understand what is expected from their advertisements. Any company running advertisements on the freeforums.org network must agree and comply with these guidelines.

For more information visit http://www.freeforums.org/ad-quality.php

We get a lot of questions about how we deal with inactive forums. In the past it’s been our approach to keep all forums created until they are removed by the forum owner. While this certainly makes us look good, it can create problems as we continue to grow. Not only do inactive forums take up valuable disk space, but they also extend the time it takes to make backups or install upgrades.

In an effort to improve performance for active forums, as of last month we started running inactivity audits. If your forum goes 60 days without a post, we will email you letting you know your forum is about to expire. You will have 7 days to make a post on your forum or it will be permanently removed from our system.

If you get this email and want to save your forum, simply make a post anywhere on your forum. Having said that, if you fail to do so and it’s removed after 7 days, we are unable to recover it.

Our active forums will be very pleased with this change as it will improve the level of speed and reliability you have come to love and expect.

There has been some confusion on our policy about “forcing upgrades” or mods on our users. I want to reflect on the system we have built and why it’s important to keep doing it the way we do.

FreeForums.org’s mission “is to supply users with all the products and services they need to build and grow their communities online”. In the last two years we’ve built on this mission and become the largest free phpbb forum host on the Internet. We have done this by looking after two different types of customers: our forum owners, and our forum users. Forum owners actually own and manage the forum, while users participate. Everyone would agree that no forum can survive without both types of users and it would be foolish to look after one and not the other.

At times though, the best interests of the forum admins and users conflict. Then we must make a decision that we feel is best for the forum as a whole. For example, awhile back a number of admins wanted the option of running popup ads on their forum in exchange for some of the profit. FreeForums.org is strongly against popup ads and to protect our users, would not allow such an option for popups.

When judging our decision to “force” upgrades or mods across our network please remember to keep your users in mind and put feedback in perspective. We have access to huge amounts of usage and research data which we use before launching something new. We always launch new features with the admin and user experience as a top concern.

With features like the welcome box, user level ad-removal, and participation facilitating mods, we have made it easier for our admins to build a forum with us than any other system. And that’s exactly what any experienced administrator looks for in a provider.

Thanks for all your support as we work together to make FreeForums.org better for everyone around the world. The community of forum admins and users that we have created is the reason why FreeForums.org has been successful so far.

With the release of our new 2.0.2 version, we’ve been busy eliminating ads from your forums in two ways:

No ads for staff - All forum staff (admins & mods) will not see ads
No ads for donors - Anyone that donates to your forum via the Community Chest will have the ads removed for life

We hope you enjoy having less ads on your forum!

When it comes to development, we have always released features on a “when ready” basis. This often left a limited time for testing and users unsure when the next upgrades would take place. Effective today, we will be switching to a two week development cycle.

What does this mean for you? You can now expect new upgrades to take place around the 1st and 16th of the month. We’ve included a diagram below to explain how this works behind the scenes:

We hope this set schedule allows more transparency on our development process, and gives you more insight into when features and mods will be released. It will also allow us to test features more before they are released on our production server.

Forum hosting today is a very competitive market and hosts must fight to survive. One of the advantages we have is our collection of modifications or mods for short. Mods alter your forum in someway, whether it be a small quick reply or large chatroom. When FreeForums.org launched in February 2007 we changed the game forever with our constant upgrade policy. Today, I’m going to outline some of the work that goes into bringing a mod off the shelf and onto your forum.

We are always looking to provide our customers all the mods they need to run a successful forum. Everytime we evaluate a mod we run it through a few questions. “Is this what our users want, will it fit with our mission of what a forum should do?” Once we decide to install a mod it goes over to our technical team where we discuss security and scalability issues. Because of our proprietary systems and the need for mods that meet our high standards, we almost always end up coding our own version of the requested mod.

After research and development we move on to testing. We never rush anything into production and want to be sure that it really does preform the way we intended. This step also includes making sure every mod works on all 350+ templates between v2 and v3. With mods being installed on over 300,000 different forums there is no room for error.

In 2009 with will be highly focused on mods for our v3 system so please let us know what mods to add!

We know how much you love to follow our every moves. I had someone PM me the other day, “You sure have spent a lot of time in the feedback board, are you going to launch new features soon?”. Well, now you can follow us via Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter! Facebook and MySpace are great ways to meet other customers in a more personal environment, and Twitter allows us to share what we’re working on in real time.

Enjoy

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”.