Raize • ✭

hey guys, i am a user of vanilla forums for 4 years, and even though i only have a basic knowledge of coding/developing i've been able to grow my student forum to over 4000 registered members, and the traffic has been growing steadily every year.. students love going on there to have personal chats and get advice about classes from other students. the community has grown alot and there have been some obstacles along the way, but im ready to develop it further and generate some sales by marketing it at the university.. if your interested in helping, im willing to share the earnings with someone. as of right now, it has zero advertising on it. anyways, if your interested, or want to know more about the forum, please contact me at "simon at raize dot ca". thanks!

Google Analytics (Nov. 2012): Visits: 22,691 Unique Visitors: 13,259 Pageviews: 57,184

way too many questions dude.. why not just try out vanilla and compare for yourself.

i switched my student forum from vb to vanilla and ppl were quite upset about it. they said it didnt feel like a forum anore but i really hated how slow and bloated vb is.. i knew eventually vanilla would the better, more modern forum software so the earlier the switch the better. vanilla doesnt have nearly the amount of features or options that vb does (ie bloat) but it has a lot that vb doesnt have so the change is worth it, especially in the long run if u want ur forum to grow. case in point, vanilla mobile version is awesome

@x00 the tricky part when you first start a new community is the classic chicken and egg question. First you have to get people to visit the forum, and then you have to get them to participate in discussions. If your forum has no members, then they won't stick around because they perceive that there is no one to talk with.

What I actually did was create multiple users with a variety of usernames and display pics. Then i just searched on other student forums to find topics that I thought would be relevant to students at my school as well (general topics like about relationships and tips to do well in classes, that sort of thing). Then I recreated those discussions on my forum. At the same time, I was spreading the word around school about the new forum.

Once people started using it, I didn't need to create discussions myself anymore and people did it for me. Once that critical mass was reached, it basically snowballed on its own. The more discussions that people were having on the site, the more it was being indexed in google, and the more new visitors were coming to the site.

@Douglas_Thor I use a website called Twitterfeed, which is really easy to set up and use with Vanilla. Twitterfeed lets you post any RSS or Atom feed to Twitter automatically.. I just used the default RSS link that every Vanilla forum comes with

http://twitterfeed.com/

@Todd

1. initially i spread it by dropping flyers around campus, and optimizing my forum for the keyword "sfu forum".. once ppl started using the forum and creating threads, those threads got indexed in google and the long tail started bringing in traffic (as well as word of mouth). right now, a majority of traffic comes from google simply by people typing in specific questions that have already been indexed on my forum

2. the most common questions are regarding academic things such as which classes to take, or which professors are easy/hard. no one really asks anything about the community itself, it is self explanatory

3. i have installed a plugin which gives forum regulars the ability to flag inappropriate posts. these posts show up in the vanilla dashboard and then we simply go through and delete them. also i have a team of volunteer moderators who help keep things clean (we have a zero tolerance policy for trolls)

4. no, i love ubc. i wish i had gone there instead of sfu but it was too far from my house to drive everyday :)