The Earners Forum Keyword Tracker Tool has finally been released. This is an amazing tool that will save webmasters a great deal of time and trouble when it comes to efficiently keeping track of your site’s rankings for keywords and your site’s backlinks. I had a techie webmaster that I respect blog about this new tool and you can read his review here. Enjoy!

Since my large forum upgraded from vbulletin 2 to vbulletin 3.0 in the summer of 2005, I’ve scratched my head over a drop in traffic. The numbers didn’t make sense which added to the mystery.

Registrations were just as high. First time visitors were just as high. All the stats that pointed to growth and healthy community seemed to be telling me that all was fine. But my stats for page impressions had dropped about 10-20 per cent. Instead of 50,000 page views per day (or more! Sometimes over 70K!) the page impressions showing up on Google Adsense stats and in my urchin had dropped to an average of 45K. It didn’t make sense.

I had wondered if we had over-loaded the pages with too many graphics, causing the page loads to be so long for many of our guests. Might be. I haven’t received a single complaint from a member so I don’t know.

I wondered about settings and would sometimes log into my admin control panel to stare at the settings, hoping something would magically jump out at me to tell me what happened in that upgrade. I wondered about the repeat visitors and the members who weren’t coming back as often.

One setting I found to alter was the “show number of posts” per page setting. Instead of 20 posts, each page would show 10 instead. This works only on those threads that are long and I only saw a small difference. Not even worth mentioning since we don’t have a lot of threads that are long.

The upgrade gave us some great new features as we had to spend 3 months re-customizing the software to add back all the special features our commumity enjoys. One of the features our staff raved about: content from the latest reply in a thread discussion in email notification. Several times our staff discussed the concern for this feature. On occasion when we had to remove replies, that content had already gone out to the members subscribed to that thread. We had discussed removing the content for that purpose.

But it wasn’t until I read Chris Kenworthy’s post here that I realized here was one issue that could make a profound difference.

Yes, I did it. I removed the content from our email notifications. It was an easy decision based on our experience with content being sent to members we had removed as inappropriate. It was an easy decision based on the many non-geeky women who join our website as their first online experience and assume their email notification is their one reply and they wonder why they don’t receive more. It was an easy decision to encourage members to head back to the forums to read their replies (more than one) and for the discussion to continue.

I edited the “language and phrase” email body for “notify”. It was easy and can be reversed at any time.

And yes, my stats are back on track which means a climb in revenue from advertisers and an increase in forum activity. Those members returning to read their replies may reply again or start another discussion.

Consider trying this out for a while to see if you find a difference in your traffic. If you don’t, you can always put it back.

by Kathy @ HysterSisters.com

About a year ago, I set all new members to automatically “Subscribe to This Thread”. A lot of members will post and never return. Maybe their question was answered somewhere else, or maybe they just forgot. Recently, I noticed myself subscribing to threads at other forums and realized I wasn’t visiting those forums nearly as often because the replies to my threads were being included in the email. For example, here’s a topic subscription from EarnersForum, notice the reply is actually in the email itself:

Dear skyhawk133,

Bryan Le has just replied to a thread you have subscribed to entitled - What are you getting your mods for the holidays? - in the Online Communities forum of Earners Forum.

This thread is located at:
http://www.earnersforum.com/showthread.php?t=9282&goto=newpost

Here is the message that has just been posted:
***************
Wow! I think it’s great that you care so much for your mods.
Got any openings? hehe, jk.
***************
There may be other replies also, but you will not receive any more notifications until you visit the forum again.

All the best,
Earners Forum

If I didn’t know better, I would assume that was the only reply and I wouldn’t bother returning to the site. So, to solve this, I took out the “reply” portion of the email and just left the link to the thread and some link to other parts of my site. This forces the user to return to my site to get the reply. Here is what my “Topic Subscription” email looks like now:

skyhawk133,

absta has just posted a reply to a topic that you have subscribed to titled “Introduce Yourself”.

The topic can be found here:
http://forums.dreamincode.net/index.php?showtopic=18938&view=getnewpost

If you have configured in your control panel to recieve immediate topic reply notifications, you may receive an
email for each reply made to this topic. Otherwise, only 1 email is sent per board visit for each subscribed topic.
This is to limit the amount of mail that is sent to your inbox.

Check out the rest of Dream.In.Code:
Programming Help: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum76.htm
Introduce Yourself: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum65.htm
Caffeine Lounge: http://forums.dreamincode.net/showforum1.htm
Code Snippets: http://code.dreamincode.net/
Job Listings: http://home.dreamincode.net/?p=careercenter
Tutorials: http://tutorials.dreamincode.net/
Developer Blogs: http://forums.dreamincode.net/?automodule=blog

In the short time since I made this change, I’ve noticed an increase in new members returning to the site and becoming more active. Fewer “drive bys”, more active members.

Hope this helps!

by Chris Kenworthy @ Ackfoo.com

Invision Power Services (IPS) announced the upcoming release of their IPB software today. IPB 2.2.0 includes several new features that community owners will find quite nice. In response to the latest friend networking trends of MySpace and similar sites, IPB 2.2.0 will include a new “Friends list” where members can manage a network of friends. Members will be able to comment on each others profiles, view member content (blog posts), write a personal bio, rate other members, and set their gender. This is a big step forward for IPB.

But, will it detract from the “forum” concept? With sites like MySpace, users have their own little worlds that don’t extend past their friend network. Members of a forum actually “belong” to the community. They can participate with the entire group and not simply their small group of friends. Will adding “friend” features encourage users to communicate in their profiles, and less in the forums? Is Web 2.0 the direction forums should be heading in or should they remain seperate, focusing on building a larger, more dedicated community of members who “belong” and are not simply someones “friend”.

More on the IPB 2.2.0 release can be found here: http://forums.invisionpower.com/index.php?showtopic=226814

Author: Chris Kenworthy
http://www.dreamincode.net

My designer, Michael Bunton has created a new extension for Firefox for one of my forums, Earners Forum.

Once you install this extension, a new menu in Firefox will show with links to all the different forums on Earners Forum.

You can also work with Mike to create a custom extension for your forum or website by contacting him via his site (link above).

This is just another tool that you can offer to your users that allows for quick and easy access to your site.

Download the Earners Forum Firefox Extension today!