Being a Support Staff at FreeForums.org has been a great experience so far and I can only expect it to be better as time goes on. After being on the Support Team for ten months, I have worked with and met many users from around the world. It is my goal to try to assist everyone to the best of my abilities. At the Support Forum we do our very best every day to help everyone we can in a timely manner.

For a little background about me, I am a sixteen year old from Alberta, Canada. I enjoy reading, writing, foruming, shopping with friends, playing board games with family, and going to the occasional party. I’ve been using FreeForums.org since e November 2008 and have always enjoyed the features that they’ve had. Finally, after building up a bit of courage in February 2010 I applied to the Support Team. Since then I’ve learned so much about FreeForums.org and phpBB in general.

On the average day I answer the various support questions from the oldest to newest in the Support Forums. Afterward, I look through and moderate the other sections of the Support Forum. As Support Staff we look out for possible bugs and other concerns that may be affecting FreeForums.org. Being the newest Support Staff here I have learned a lot from the people around me. Wickett (Paul) was a great help in getting me started at the Support Forum and his input and advice has always been appreciated and valued. Jackal and Division have also been a great help, they are highly dedicated to FreeForums.org and have been extremely good at keeping the Support Team up-to-date with the goings on at FreeForums.org. There are quite a few perks to being a support staff. If you think you ever want to become a support staff, feel free to come and help out at the Support Forum. For more information about applications you can read here: viewtopic.php?f=1&t=52930

I hope to continue helping everyone out at the Support Forum in the New Year. If you ever have an issue or a problem that you need help with never hesitate to ask about it at the Support Forum. We are there every day to help out with various questions or concerns that you might have. If you every want to say “Hi” Feel free to send me a Private Message at the Support Forum, however, please post any support related questions in the appropriate support forum. If you’re at the support forum, you can also post in the Off Topic section to discuss anything from FreeForums.org to your favorite color. As well, posting in the Feedback and Service Suggestions forum will allow you to suggest future MODs/features that you may want installed. You never know, your MOD might just get installed!

I wish everyone a happy and healthy new year. With 2011 right around the corner there will be plenty of new features at FreeForums.org and as always the Support Team will be there to help you out with them. Stay tuned for future information about FreeForums.org updates at the Support Forum or in the Monthly FreeForums.org Newsletter which is sent to the founding e-mail address for your forum.

Happy New year,

Sabre
Support Team Member

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.

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.

Today we released a new feature that allows board owners to enable In-Text ads on their forum and receive service credits for doing so. We understand that while enabling ads is a big plus for you, some users may think otherwise. Because of this, we’ve prepared some points you can relay to your members:

• These ads will benefit them by allowing you (the admin) to purchase additional features to improve the forum.
• They’re not intrusive like popup ads or flashing banner ads.
• They can disable them if they want by clicking the question mark in the ad box. However, doing so will hurt your forum so this isn’t recommended.
• They’re relevant to the information on the post and can actually be informative.
  

Hello all!

As I have been saying in the support forums over the last couple weeks, I will be posting blog entries outlining FreeForums.org and its infrastructure of the past, present, and future. But before I can do this, I should really introduce myself to all of you.

I am known as Cero, and I was brought onto the FreeForums.org tech team back in late July as a consultant. I am a programmer and systems administrator with several years of experience with PHP, Perl, shell scripting, as well as XHTML, CSS, and various other programming and markup languages. I currently operate over 35 Linux servers (Debian, Redhat Enterprise Linux, and Ubuntu) as well as a small number of Windows Server 2003 servers.

I have been brought onto the FreeForums.org team in the capacity of a chief technical officer. In that, I now lead the development and changes to the infrastructure (which includes all those pesky upgrades) as well as provide guidance and direction for the programming team.

Lately, many people have been complaining about the upgrades and asking us to stop for awhile. Sadly, that is impossible as it would leave us offline, permanently. So in the coming blog posts, I will be outlining exactly what you want to know and everything there is to know about the infrastructure that FreeForums.org uses to provide you service.

Anyway, if you have any questions you would like to see answered in blog posts, please reply to this and let me know!

At FreeForums.org, we’re always moving at the speed of light. Creating this blog was no exception.

I came up with the idea for a blog only four days ago, and your feedback convinced me to set everything in motion. Here we are, four days later and I’m proud to announce the Inside FreeForums.org blog. We understand the importance of connecting to customers in every way possible. On this blog we look forward to posting the thoughts and opinions of FreeForums.org staff. This blog also gives customers a way to provide feedback that we will read.

We have quite a few exciting posts planned for the near future so keep checking back. Or, you could join the 21st century and subscribe to the RSS feed.