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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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”.