What are VIP Memberships?
The VIP Membership product replaces the Community Chest “donate” feature. It allows your forum members to purchase “VIP Memberships” on your forum and get additional features and access. We charge each member $19.95/year and split it 50/50 with you, the forum owner. We understand being the admin of a forum can be very time consuming, and we created this product as a way for you to earn revenue. FreeForums.org is the only forum host on the market that offers revenue sharing. For more information on the details you can view our knowledgebase article @ http://kb.freeforums.org/questions/108/VIP+Membership.

This feature is going live on all new forums within 48 hours, and across all current forums within 30 days. When it’s live, we encourage you to create a new forum @ http://www.freeforums.org/phpbb-signup.php and test out the product.

As always, our goal is to offer you more products and services than any other host around. This product not only offers your members additional perks for upgrading their membership, but it earns you money for your time.

-The FreeForums.org Team

After doing extensive research we noticed these bots were able to get around our Google Analytics and Statcounter programs, thus the reason we didn’t notice them racking up hundreds of thousands of pageviews each day. All these spam bots spamming dead forums were taking up valuable server resources, operating completely hidden from our traffic stat programs, and causing legit forums to run slow during some hours.

Immediately we started working on a post level spam filter. While the details are confidential (we wouldn’t want the spammers to find out), this works by searching every incoming post and giving it a “spam rating” based on several signals we have. Forums and topics with a high spam rating will be flagged for manual review and we will be able to take action against those spammers in seconds. We expect to launch this new anti-spam system next week. Once completed, you will notice faster forums with even less downtime as we free up more resources for legit traffic.

We are very pleased to take our spam fighting to an unprecedented level. Spam is something that happens and no real way around it. What does matter is how your host handles it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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