Forums? Who needs ‘em!
Many developers I speak to want their own heavily populated forum based in their community. I was no different. It’s really nice to have a following and to be able to tap into this group to get a sense of what is trending, where to take your apps next, and directly communicate with those who use your software daily. My core forum audience, maybe even you, skewed very young. By nature this requires constant moderation and tough decisions of how to handle all the crazy that goes on. But what really sucks is how hard it can be to get a forum to become inviting to new users when you’re membership is low. My reaction was to keep upgrading and changing the site. This ultimately confused users and with the growing anger on the forums it made it near impossible to get new members. It was time for them to go…
So I closed the forums. I’ll just blog, invite other friends to blog, and allow for the community to easily submit articles to the front page. But I was running on forum based software on my web-server. I needed to change from Simple Machines Forum (one of the many pieces of forum software I went through) to something specifically for the purpose of a community blog. WordPress is right up my alley.
Going to WordPress is a bit odd for me. I started my site with WordPress years back, and here I am going back to it. It’s come a long way though and I really enjoy it. It’s weakness is the need to bridge user accounts and posts to and from a (decent) forum software. Luckily with the forums out, this becomes less a concern.
What I bring to you today is as much information as you can take from me, my friends, and even you. Similar to what I originally had planned earlier, but without the hassle of using forum software to do a blog’s job.
Do you have some interesting homebrew news, Apple news, or something inbetween? Once registered, you can submit news to me straight from your dashboard for inclusion on the ZodTTD frontpage!
Enjoy your stay,
ZodTTD