The Biggest Boards displays the most active Forums and Message Boards on the web with stats that update daily. Welcome to The Biggest Boards Webmaster Forums AND Directory! This forum focuses on resources for message board and website owners. Join us today (always free!) by clicking on the Register link below. Registration takes only a few minutes (or less) and you will be instantly part of The Biggest Boards community!
Now your very close to reaching your 1,000th forum do you have any plans for what the future brings with TheBiggestBoards?
I am already finding that the rankings and also the site profiles for each forum to be a valuable tool when looking at new things to do with the site from innovating, promoting, adding content etc, to see what the competition are doing and better it, or alternatively follow their strategy a little.
But what future updates to the site do you plan and what are the ETA of these new features and plans?
I am sure a LOT of forum owners will be interested in knowing your future plans even if they are very long future away.
exochat wrote: what future updates to the site do you plan and what are the ETA of these new features and plans? I am sure a LOT of forum owners will be interested in knowing your future plans even if they are very long future away. Keep up the good work guys!
Thanks exochat. Good questions and something that we are always thinking about daily. While I can not give a time table on any of these things here are some of the features we will be working on.
The Main Site Directory: adding variables to our custom script to fix some of the current sites and types of forum software that are not reporting correctly.
The Main Site Directory: increasing the variables of our custom script so some foreign language forums can submit.
The Main Site Directory: adding the ability to filter the directory "by category" feature so people can look at the ranked forums by different categories as well (currently you can filter by post count, member count or software)
The Main Site Directory: Starting to add many "admin/staff reviews" on the individual site pages. For example we have done one review and will be adding many more in the future - http://www.thebiggestboards.com/341/Other/Roleplay-Adventures-2.0/ . In the future we will be looking for new staff reviewers to help do many of the reviews.
The Main Site Directory: Going along with #4 above we will be revamping the way the individual forum pages look with a little different layout and additional features on each page to go along with the "admin/staff reviews" of the different forums.
The Biggest Boards Blog: Having guest writers do regular articles for the blog on topics like SEO optimization, advertising, link building, and anything related to general forum management. The blog is something that I am looking forward to expanding.
The goal is to have MANY guest writers produce new and regular articles for the blog and have The Biggest Boards Blog grow and evolve independently as well. Articles posted on the blog will also be posted in a new section on the forums for greater exposure and cross linking.
I am looking for guest writers now to start getting this rolling, but have not formally announced that yet (until now, lol)
Dynamic Ranking Buttons: Creating a dynamic button that can be placed on other forums that shows their current rank. It might look something like this:
8) The Biggest Boards Forums here are a major piece to the entire site that we will keep working on very hard. I really see the potential for the forums here to grow and be one of the busiest admin/webmaster forums for forum owners of all sizes. The goal is to keep pushing to make these forums the most active they can be.
9) Our own TBB ranking system. This will not be tied into just amount of posts, or amount of members, but be a combination of things and will include speed of the forum, quality of posting content and some other factors. This will probably be tied to #4 above
10) Interviews with forum owners. we plan to interview some of the forum owners and then put these interviews or question and answer sessions on their pages, and feature on the forum as well.
Finally while getting to 1000 forums in the directory is a big miles stone it is a TINY amount compared to the estimated amount of forums on the Internet. There are many millions of forums and we have only barely scraped a pimple on the surface of all of the active forums out there. I would like to see the list grow to well over 10,000 forums eventually and go up from there. I know it will take some time, but each day I learn about hundreds of new forums that I never knew existed.
There are many other features we have discussed adding in the future and my plan is to never stop developing the features of this site.
____________________ Have you added your forum to the FREE Forum Directory yet? Hit the SUBMIT button and add your forum for FREE today!
As you can see we have a comprehensive list. I still consider us in the Alpha stages. Once the variables and sites all report correctly, we can consider Beta.
Once we have all the features we want we will be in RC (release candidate). Once the tweaks and bugs of these features are fixed, I would say we will officially have TBB 1.0
-Some sort of Stars system for forum reviews. For example, Stars out of 5 on a forums Layout, Speed, Content, Activity, Advertising banners, Unique appeal, etc. These can be either reviewed by Staff who wont abuse the star system giving fair scores, or put public for people to vote on getting a general opinion.
-Not only a Staff Review over what a website is like, but maybe a few "quotes" from other users. You are asking people on this forum to post their sites to be reviewed by other people but eventually as this place grows the sites on that forum will drop off onto page 2 and 3 and so on. So might be a consideration to quote parts of peoples review posts and adding it to the profile. So they get a Staff review and then a collection of review snippets from the general public.
-The blog articles are a great idea but it would also be good to have a knowledge bank. There are a LOT of webmaster forums out there but it might be an idea to collect together the really useful and informative stuff together into a knowledgebank itself rather than loads of stickies etc. A lot of the stuff on the forums could be collected together and written a little more professional by a writer onto the blog, and from there it could be placed in a knowledgebank as an extra tool that is quickly and easily searchable for what you are looking for. Building up information on Software, links, tips etc for running a forum while allowing the forums to breed new ideas and information amongst members to hopefully find something worthy of adding to the knowledgebank.
-Adding more and more stats if possible in the future, such things as daily pageviews of a site, daily unique visitors to a site, number of backlinks to a site.... just bringing all the tools on other sites and search engines into this one to build up an incredibly detailed forum profile of each site.
I reckon if you found a way to include much of what you were suggesting and some of what I did you are going to not only have a directory listing of forums, but also a must have site any forum owner should be bookmarking on their favourites list. At the moment, I am popping in everyday primarily to check my ranking, and compare my site to those around me to get an idea of how they are getting better alexa/google ranks, there member/post ratios and also seeing if their site has anything on it that is so popular that i could incorporate a similar idea onto mine.
Then after that I browse the forums for any good posts that might help me develop my site further.
To have even more tools available to do that would be beneficial for me and anyone else serious about wanting to make their forum succeed.
I would be happy to write the odd Blog article in the future for you, also willing to help do other minor work that is volunteer "as and when you have time" stuff such as simple reviews (the stars stuff rather than large written reviews) etc.
Of course TBB is already one of the best directories and tools available as it is so I wouldnt worry too much about pushing forward too quickly. But it certainly could become the most famous tool for a forum admin if you did push on with more tools and features. ;)
Exochat. Thank you for the feedback and ideas. Your post reminded me of a few features that we have definitely discussed adding. I revised my original post above with these additional things that we will be working on long term.
Some additional comments on your post
The "knowledge bank" is a great idea and something we hope to work on as the forum gets busier. Once we have many thousands of posts we will be able to start organizing the information as you mentioned into more of an "index" of information that will hopefully be easy to access and search.
We will always be looking for new and interesting ways to add more features to the individual forum pages. More things like the Alexa and PR rankings now. The key is coding everything so the information is dynamically pulled to each individual forum page and we will be working on that ongoing.
Thank you also for your offer to help. We really appreciate that and may take you up on that offer in the future!
Thanks again for the great feedback.
____________________ Have you added your forum to the FREE Forum Directory yet? Hit the SUBMIT button and add your forum for FREE today!
TVDinner wrote: exochat wrote: what future updates to the site do you plan and what are the ETA of these new features and plans? I am sure a LOT of forum owners will be interested in knowing your future plans even if they are very long future away. Keep up the good work guys!
Thanks exochat. Good questions and something that we are always thinking about daily. While I can not give a time table on any of these things here are some of the features we will be working on.
The Main Site Directory: adding variables to our custom script to fix some of the current sites and types of forum software that are not reporting correctly.
The Main Site Directory: increasing the variables of our custom script so some foreign language forums can submit.
The Main Site Directory: adding the ability to filter the directory "by category" feature so people can look at the ranked forums by different categories as well (currently you can filter by post count, member count or software)
The Main Site Directory: Starting to add many "admin/staff reviews" on the individual site pages. For example we have done one review and will be adding many more in the future - http://www.thebiggestboards.com/341/Other/Roleplay-Adventures-2.0/ . In the future we will be looking for new staff reviewers to help do many of the reviews.
The Main Site Directory: Going along with #4 above we will be revamping the way the individual forum pages look with a little different layout and additional features on each page to go along with the "admin/staff reviews" of the different forums.
The Biggest Boards Blog: Having guest writers do regular articles for the blog on topics like SEO optimization, advertising, link building, and anything related to general forum management. The blog is something that I am looking forward to expanding.
The goal is to have MANY guest writers produce new and regular articles for the blog and have The Biggest Boards Blog grow and evolve independently as well. Articles posted on the blog will also be posted in a new section on the forums for greater exposure and cross linking.
I am looking for guest writers now to start getting this rolling, but have not formally announced that yet (until now, lol)
Dynamic Ranking Buttons: Creating a dynamic button that can be placed on other forums that shows their current rank. It might look something like this:
8) The Biggest Boards Forums here are a major piece to the entire site that we will keep working on very hard. I really see the potential for the forums here to grow and be one of the busiest admin/webmaster forums for forum owners of all sizes. The goal is to keep pushing to make these forums the most active they can be.
9) Our own TBB ranking system. This will not be tied into just amount of posts, or amount of members, but be a combination of things and will include speed of the forum, quality of posting content and some other factors. This will probably be tied to #4 above
10) Interviews with forum owners. we plan to interview some of the forum owners and then put these interviews or question and answer sessions on their pages, and feature on the forum as well.
Finally while getting to 1000 forums in the directory is a big miles stone it is a TINY amount compared to the estimated amount of forums on the Internet. There are many millions of forums and we have only barely scraped a pimple on the surface of all of the active forums out there. I would like to see the list grow to well over 10,000 forums eventually and go up from there. I know it will take some time, but each day I learn about hundreds of new forums that I never knew existed.
There are many other features we have discussed adding in the future and my plan is to never stop developing the features of this site.
Id be happy to join in with numbers 5&6, id love to contribute to the reviews! and also the blog! I love blogging!
well #10 on my original post is for interviews with forum owners and adding that to the individual site page or somewhere associated with each forum page. A lot could eventually be put with all of this.
____________________ Have you added your forum to the FREE Forum Directory yet? Hit the SUBMIT button and add your forum for FREE today!
Another idea could be with the forum interviews for example.
A person who is going to be doing the interview ask the forum owner what forum they submitted that they run.
And as you said above, it'd be added either in a site page or somewhere else. Also was thinking that it could be somehow added onto their forum page, with their stats and all that.
So that way if members on that person's forum comes over here, can see what else the forum owner does besides running their own forum.
