Using SSI For Auto Updates

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: WebDesign | Response: 0

We all realize the benefits of being able to save time when building sites so, I got into thinking, how can I make my sites look as if they are continually updated without the need to go in and update them manually? Enter the world of SSI.

SSI is actually a nifty little tool, not only can you include files from a central location but, you can include them at specific times of the day, days of the week or even months of the year, very handy indeed if you are building any type of site that needs updating periodically.

Once the main burst of work has been completed you can pretty much use the same files over and over again to help you out.

So onto the auto updating SSI, the following SSI coding will enable you to update a page or pages based on which day of the month it is. It will check the day the page has been accessed and display the relevant information again, this is a handy thing to have should your sponsor be running a promotion over several days, all you need to do is update a selection of SSI files and all of your sites are updated instantly.

<!–#config timefmt=”%d”–>
<!–#include virtual=”/yourdirectory/$DATE_LOCAL.txt”–>

What you need to do is create 31 text files named 01.txt right the way through to 31.txt take the SSI call above and edit the location of the SSI files on your server, you may like to have a central folder named /SSI/ for this purpose so the location would be changed to /domain.com/SSI/$DATE_LOCAL.txt

I the 31 files you created you could have a table ad with eight of your sponsors links, an article in each one or even just a simple text link, anything that you may want to update can be included in these files.

As I mentioned above you can base the time, date and even month of rotation to whatever you like to alter how the files are rotated and ultimately viewed on the web you should change the %d in the timefmt field to one of the following:

%d : Day of the month requires 31 files named 01.txt to 31.txt
%w : Day of the week requires 7 files named 0.txt to 6.txt
%j : Day of the year requires 365 files named 001.txt to 365.txt
%u : The week of the year requires 52 files named 00.txt to 53.txt
%m : The month of the year requires 12 files named 01.txt to 12.txt
%H : Hour of the day requires 24 files named 00.txt to 23.txt
%M : Minute of the hour requires 60 files named 00.txt to 59.txt

As you can see from the above there really are no limitations to the uses of updating using SSI and, apart fro the relative ease of use and the time saved using them should one sponsor not be converting for you all you need to do to swap sponsors is alter your central set of SSI files and you have instantly changed sponsors over all of your sites.

Article written by Lee

Mirroring Adult Sites – Stage Four

Date: 2011.02.23 | Category: Promotion, Tutorials | Response: 0

We are now going to take our basic template and start to make some pages for the link lists for this you will need to open up your original warning page. Once you have this page open you need to visit a couple of the link lists that you use. Go to the submissions page of the link list and download their reciprocal buttons.

In the same way that we did with the TGP pages we created you now need to edit the warning page you have open and insert the recip links on your warning page, ideally and, as most link lists will require this, the recip links should be placed above the enter and exit links.

Once you have done this, you now need to save your newly edited page as linklist1.html in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder, do this for as many of the link lists that you wish to submit to, each time saving the new page in the /FreeSite/LinkList/ folder.

Also at this stage, we should add a console to our link list page, ideally a blur console with links going to your surfer trap FPA’s. You can find the Java coding to create a blur console on the tutorial about building a surfer trap.

Once we have done this, we now have some more sites created. However, this time, the page/s we have just created are designed to build the traffic we have to our site/s.

Once you have these pages saved you now need to re-open your original warning page once more.

This time, we are going to optimize the page for the search engines, again, in the same way we added our ALT tags on the surfer trap we are going to add them to the warning page however, we are also going to optimize our keywords, description and, site title.

Once we have optimized our original warning page we should now save this as se1.html in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder we created at the start of this tutorial. Once one SE page has been created, you need to create a selection of others making sure that you swap around the meta tags to ensure they are all different to each other, I would suggest making three variations of these SE pages each time saving them in the /FreeSite/Engine/ folder.

The next thing we are going to do is to ‘dirty’ these SE pages up some more, pretty much in the same manner as we did with the surfer trap tutorial. What we need to do is add a small pop up console to the three SE pages along with a blur console, these consoles can be the same ones that we used for our surfer trap or, we can create new ones however, I think the smart thing to do would be if we used the ones we currently have online. So once we have added these consoles we need to save the pages.

Also, to these SE pages we should add our Banner exchange code, as these will be going into the search engines there are no rules as to what we can and can not do on these SE pages so we should make sure that even if they just get one hit, we get additional traffic from them. By adding a banner exchange code as we did on the surfer tutorial we can drive additional traffic either to our sites or to our surfer trap, where you send this traffic is your choice. If you want to sign up for our new banner exchange you can find it at http://www.pornclient.com.

Now we have the completed site template built. We need to submit the pages and sites we have just completed to the TGP’s, AVS’s, Link Lists and, the Search Engines.

Once we have submitted these sites all that we need to do to create a new set of sites is to find another set of 50 images, rename the images as we did at the start of this tutorial, pic1.jpg, thumb1.jpg etc and simply upload the site to our server without the full size images and the thumbnails. Once the HTML pages are online, we now have to upload the full size images and the thumbnails and we have a set of sites using different content to our original one built in less than 5 minutes.

The best thing with these sites is that if a any time we want to alter the layout, all we need to do is edit the HTML of the version we have saved on our HD and we have a new template ready to use.

I hope you have found some use out of this tutorial and, I am sure you can think of other ways in which we can use templates of this style, this tutorial was just detailing some of the basics however, we can make the template as simple or as complicated as we like. Our only limits are what we make for ourselves.

Article written by Lee

Getting Webmaster Traffic To Your Design Site

Date: 2011.02.22 | Category: General, Promotion | Response: 0

Just starting in the design biz? Well you’re going to need some traffic to your design work. You need to get your name out to as many people as humanly possible. If you don’t have the contacts, then you don’t have the work. Network, communicate, and setup your portfolio. These are the 3 most important steps when starting your design company, preceding these three steps are advertising and demonstrating.

When I first started designing, I had no clue what I was doing except for designing websites. I knew I needed clients, but had no idea where to start. I met up with a ouple of other webmasters one night. I told them I had just started and was looking for some work. They took me in and taught me the trade. They showed me a few tricks in how to design things much quicker, and also subconsciously taught me to make sure as many people as possible see my work, and that they know who its from.

I worked with my friends for a few months when things started to get slow, so I took it upon myself to start my own company. I still got outsourced work from them, but now was taking on my own clients, but I had forgotten one important step. Advertising, the biggest step to forget. So I started posting on message boards to get my name in the dirt. I received a few clients, but nothing large. Then one day out of the blue a man came to me and wanted 4 pay sites designed. Wow, a real client at last. He said he saw my posts on a resource forum and decided to use me for his work.

I worked for this client for about 2 months, and more and more people were coming to me. I had been doing something good, but work started to slow and finally I realized I had been working for the same few clients and had not been getting anyone else in the door. Maybe board posting wasn’t enough? Exactly, its not, I asked around to see what I could do I had gotten a few suggestions like banner trades, recip’s, work for advertising. So I did them all. And soon enough I had more clients than I could shake a stick at.

Network.

Talk to people, people that are in the biz. Webmasters and designers. Talk to anyone you possibly can that could further spread your name of even bring work to you. If you do not network, then don’t plan on anything coming your way.

Communicate.

Get on boards, ICQ, AIM, MSN, whatever. Just make sure that people see you and know you are there. Send them emails with different offers, not spam, but personal emails. Take it upon yourself to try and get your name into the field.

Portfolio.

If you do not have one of these, then you might as well try to sell a spider to an arachnophobe. Design some fakes sites if you don’t have anything to show. Do some banners, tours, anything that shows the potential of your work. Make sure you present it as efficiently as possible. People do not want to root around not knowing what they are looking at.

Advertise.

Make banners, buttons, links, ads, and anything that you can stick your name on. Get listed on any and all Webmaster resource sites, and design sites. This will help you establish a name base and let people know you are around.

Demonstrate.

Write articles for resource sites, create different tutorials also, this will let people know you know what your doing. The more people that like your ideas, the more they will like you. Therefore the more likely you will get work.

Follow these steps as I did and you will be on your way to having clients beating down your door. Also, make sure you really have something to offer before trying to sell your work. Be unique in what you design and how you present it. Clients love it when their sites are different from others, obviously.

Article written by John

The Gay Adult Market – Gay Subcultures

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

I thought I would take a break from writing about online adult marketing for a change and instead, give many of the straight webmasters looking to break into the gay market a bit of an insight into what makes a gay man ‘tick’ and, whilst this is going to be different from guy to guy, the one thing that will remain constant throughout is that this article is based on the gay lifestyle and subculture in both society and, the internet.

What Is A Subculture?

Lets start at the beginning shall we? To understand this article you are first of all going to need to understand what a subculture is well, a subculture as defined by http://www.dictionary.com is, ‘A cultural subgroup differentiated by status, ethnic background, residence, religion, or other factors that functionally unify the group and act collectively on each member.’

In layman’s terms, that means, that a subculture is a group of people (or individual) that have something different about them than other people.

In the instance of this article we are going to be looking at the gay subculture and specifically, how this culture is broken down into its own set of subcultures.

The Gay Subculture – Lets Define The Gay Culture.

Gay culture is the heritage of culture, knowledge, and references to which gay people fall heir by the fact of their sexual orientation.

Some individuals argue that there are to many gay people who do not participate in ‘gay culture’ for the concept to be meaningful or that gay culture in itself is placing labels on the stereotype most people think of when they thing about gay people however with this said, there are also those who argue the flip side of the coin. One thing is for sure however, gay culture certainly does exist and, within this culture itself there are many complex facets ranging from sexual preferences through to the types of vacation people take.

Gay Subcultures – The Facets.

Whether we choose to think about the different subcultures within the gay community or not one thing is for certain, the subcultures in our community are wide and far reaching from your local gay bar to Soho in a city thousands of miles away most of the gay subcultures can be found almost anywhere in the world and, from this aspect, it makes gay individual no different than other person. For example, the BDSM lifestyle is large in the straight culture however, it is also hugely popular in the gay culture to often with groups of individuals who devote their whole way of life to this. In essence however, many of the gay subcultures are no different to that of their straight counterparts the only difference being, the individuals who practice them, are gay.

Gay Subcultures – An Overview.

For many webmasters who currently work in the straight market their first attempt and even their second attempt at marketing to the gay lifestyle may fail however, many do not realize the simplest of rules when it comes to marketing products and services to gay individuals online, you need to be as, if not more, detailed and direct to gay surfers than straight, give them something they can find anywhere at anytime and the chances are they will not buy however, give them something that suits their tastes perfectly and you have a customer for life.

Article written by Lee

What’s A CHMOD?

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Hosting, WebDesign | Response: 0

CHMOD is another name for setting the permissions of files on your server.

All UNIX based web servers understand the concept of permissions. these are broken down into three distinct areas.

Permissions for the person who OWNS the file.
Permissions for the group (all users are members of one or more groups).
Permissions for everyone else.

Permissions are listed one of two ways either using numbers such as 755 or, using letters such as rwx-xr-x however they both mean the same thing.

The first number or first group of three letters stands for the permissions of the owner (IE 7 or rwx).
The second number or second group of letters stands for the permissions of the group (IE 5 or xr).
The third number or third group of letters stands for the permissions of everyone else (IE 5 or x).

The way the system works is as follows:

1 = x = you are able to execute (run) this program.
2 = w = you are able to write to this file.
4 = r = you are able to read the contents of this file.

so if you add it up rwx = 7.

So, in the example given above (755 or rwx-xr-x) the owner is allowed to read and write the file AND execute it.
The group is allowed to execute and write to the file.
Everyone else can execute the file.

We hope this gives you a little more insight to how CHMOD’ing or, setting the permissions on your server can affect how files act.

Article written by Lee

Resource Forums – The Changing Face Of The Adult Industry

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: General | Response: 0

Online adult webmaster resource sites are becoming a thing of the past instead, we have witnessed a new breed of resource site being birthed in the adult industry, the resource forum. It seems like almost every major adult sponsor and webmaster has their own resource forum as of the current time however, what is making these forums stand out from one another and, more importantly, can you actually learn anything valuable from them.

Webmaster Resource Forums.

Back in the day there were only a handful of resource forums made available for adult webmasters to educate themselves further, these included such sites as Ynot Masters, Netpond (then The Condom Chronicles) and Porn Resource, however, to date there are no less than 200 webmaster resource forums floating around the internet for adult webmasters to post on.

With this amount of resource forums available to webmasters it seem impossible that many webmasters cant be making a profit however, upon closer inspection a disturbing trend seems to be taking place.

Resource Forums – Webmasters Posts.

With the sudden surge of webmaster resource forums in the last 6-12 months there is one thing that is apparent, most of, if not all of the resource forums to have spawned during this time have one thing in common, the webmasters who post on them, often, these webmasters are posting for a single reason, to get other webmasters to click on their signatures, nothing more, nothing less.

It would appear that the adult industry is heading towards a meltdown of the adult resource forums, with more and more webmasters grabbing free scripts such as phpbb to load onto their domain and launch their own resource forum it would appear at first glance as if the industry is a thriving community of webmasters all willingly helping each other out however, this is not the case, instead, we find post after post duplicated across multiple resource forums in the effort of making the longest thread, getting the most page views and, ultimately, getting the most signature clicks.

Webmaster Resources.

So with all of this going on what’s happening to the actual resource sites? Well they are still around and, they are still being used however, these have now become second place to the message forum, often as mentioned above, webmasters will post the same message on several message boards and get several replies of exactly the same answer from exactly the same people. Whilst this in itself is a good thing (the exchange of information) my personal feelings are that we are heading towards an excess of resource forums and, whilst communication is needed, there also becomes a point at which you can get an information overload, new webmasters entering the adult industry will see the variety of forums made available to them and start posting however, in doing so they forget the one thing that they actually should be doing, working.

Webmaster Resource Forums – Overview.

I think within the next 12 months we are going to see one of two things start to happen, either the resource forum phenomenon will continue as it is doing now or, the resource forum will become a thing of the past whilst a new medium takes its place, one thing is certain though all these webmasters posting on forums to get sig views and post counts are not doing the one thing they should be, making money and, this becomes all to apparent after watching the same old posts, make the rounds to the same old forums time and time again.

Resource forums can be great help to the adult webmaster however, at the same time, they can also become a webmasters biggest downfall, remember why resource forums are there, to help you when you need it and to socialize when you have to, at what point to do you stop getting help and start becoming a post whore? Well only you can answer that question.

Article written by Lee

Thumbnail Preview TGPs And The Gay Market Place

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: TGP | Response: 0

One of the latest crazes to hit the gay adult market from a webmasters point of view is that of the thumbnail preview TGP and, more surprisingly than this is the fact that this new breed of gay adult TGP seems to attract more traffic than the standard format TGP ever did so, what is a thumbnail preview TGP and just how do you go about making one of your own? This is what we will investigate in this article.

Thumbnail Preview TGP Basics.

A thumbnail preview TGP is just as the name suggests, a standard TGP with one main difference, the TGP itself doesn’t list gallery descriptions rather a small preview image of the content placed on each of the galleries submitted. This thumbnail preview is usually size between 100×100 pixels and 60×60 pixels in dimension however, the thumbnail preview size can be determined by the webmaster owning the TGP.

How Do I Start My Own Thumbnail Preview TGP?

In order to start your own thumbnail preview TGP you will need a couple of things, first and foremost, a domain name to run it on, the current trend in the gay marketplace is to name your TGP something short, memorable and, well, brand able so, the domain name you choose for your TGP should take all of these aspects into consideration. The next thing you will need in order to run your own gay thumbnail preview TGP will be the script which you use to manage the TGP itself, for this purpose I would highly recommend Autogallery MySQL from http://www.jmbsoft.com it is affordable and, easy to maintain which is a must if you are wanting to run a sizable TGP. One other thing that you may also like to consider investing in for your thumbnail preview TGP is a design, in fact, most of the ‘good’ thumbnail preview TGPs whether they are focused in the straight or gay market, have a clean, almost pay site quality design aspect to them. Of course, you do not need to keep up with the joneses however, if it works for other people, then why not see if it will work for you also?

Thumbnail TGP Structure.

So you now have a domain and have purchased the script and / or design that you want to use on your thumbnail preview TGP what next? Well first things are first, you should take a look at some of the other sites that currently exist and see how they do things, find out what things you feel they are doing wrong and, capitalize on that.

You should also make some decisions now as to the look and feel you want your thumbnail preview TGP to have, how many galleries are you going to list on the front page each day? Will you be utilizing the archives feature of your TGP script? What limitations do you want to put on submissions from other webmasters? These are all aspects of running a TGP that you need to think of prior to opening your site up for general submissions.

In general however, you will find that most thumbnail preview TGP sites will have roughly 100 thumbnail images on their front page of the site with any additional galleries being listed in their archives section again, you should decide on how you want to maintain your own site.

Getting Traffic To Your Thumbnail Preview TGP.

Now you have hopefully set your thumbnail preview TGP live you need to do one final step in making the TGP itself a huge success, get the traffic flowing, one of the best ways to do this, as with any other type of site is to ask your friends and associates to trade traffic with your site however, should this not be an option then you should use more conventional methods such as submitting galleries to other TGP sites ensuring that you use a recip to your TGP on each gallery as well as utilizing other forms of traffic such as cheap brokered traffic, top lists, web rings and, even counters, within a month or so you will soon start to see a steady flow of new webmaster gallery submissions and, with each new submission comes more traffic and ultimately, more income from your site.

Article written by Lee

Anime vs. Cartoon – What Is The Difference?

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Content | Response: 0

Over the past three years I have written articles, been a guest on radio shows, and even been part of panels, all discussing the wonders and bewilderment of anime and hentai content. In that time, I thought I had covered most aspects of the niche, the content, the market, the huge underground following, the money making potential etc. Yet I am still being asked on a regular basis questions about the niche and especially about the confusion of what is anime vs. other toon type content. So I decided to re-visit the issue in this article.

One of the newer occurrences that seems to have confused many a webmaster, is the recent surge of content providers now offering images that they have titled as anime. Many of these images are computer generated images (CGI) in 3D like format, which tend to portray almost life like images. While others are cartoon images in various styles, that while they do have their market, are certainly not anime.

Anime and Bishoujo (also known as Hentai) images are very unique in their style and characterization. If you know certain key points about the art work, you will know if what you are looking at or purchasing can truly be termed anime. And believe me, your surfers or members definitely know the difference! Here are some of the key things that you can do to assure yourself of what you are getting:

Eyes: The eyes are one of the most important features of anime style characters; they are the most expressive parts of the face, and are part of what makes each character different and recognizable. Large eyes are of course the one feature that most people associate with anime, but just making the eyes large is not enough. Anime characters’ eyes should always have at least some sort of shading. Anime females in particular tend to have really heavy shading and lots of shiny areas. Male characters have light glares in their eyes, too, though they often are not as large or obvious.

Nose and Mouth: Anime style noses and mouths are pretty straightforward, they consists of three basic simple shapes: a wedge for the nose, a long, thin line for the mouth, and a shorter line to define the lower lip. You will rarely see teeth on an anime character, even when the character is seen with the mouth wide open.

Hair: Hair styles of Anime characters are stylized, unique, and sometimes impossible to have in the real world. Any hair color is possible, be it blond, black, sky blue, light green, orange, pink, all the colors of the rainbow. Hair length is also unusual as most males have shoulder length hair and most females either have really short hair or their hair is at least four feet long.

Now this is obviously a generalization as there will be some variance in images depending on the style of a particular artist. But in general, this is what the anime/hentai surfer will look for. The other key to authentic anime is the style itself, the art is hand drawn and until recently always hand inked or colored as well. Though some artists now draw the sketches by hand and color via the computer, it is still very easy to notice the difference in quality of hand drawn art.
I am not saying that other artworks do not have their market, they certainly do! I just want to make sure, if you are promoting images as Anime that you are truly using anime images, otherwise your sales or sign ups will not be near what they could be.

Now let’s visit toons shall we? Cartoons, toons, sexy toons, erotic art, erotic illustrations, what ever you want to call them, are also very popular with many surfers. Toons are just what they seem to be, illustrated drawing depicting various characters in an exaggerated form. These images are fantastic for use on or for promoting the mired of Toon sites out in the market today. Toons, like Anime can fulfill fantasies that cannot be realized in real life or with real people. If you can think of it, it can be drawn! There is high demand for quality sexy toons because the loyal surfers out there cannot get enough.

There are things to watch out for however even in toon content. Copyrighted characters, this has been a popular debate among those of us that deal and make our living from anime and toons. A copyright is a copyright is a copyright! Whether it be created or shot, the characters belong to the creators. Even if the character has been modified to blur the identity, if it is a recognizable character, ie, Batman, Flintstones, Sailor Moon, DragonBallZ etc. then you can be opening yourself up to prosecution from the copyright holder. Many a webmaster can tell you about hearing from Nintendo, Disney, Marvel and many other companies on this issue. Some providers feel that since such images are a parody of the copyrighted characters, they are protected, and in some cases they might be. But unless you have very deep pockets or a rich uncle to help you win that court battle, I would strongly suggest you steer clear of this type of image.

As with any content you purchase it is important that you do your research and know your provider! Just because some one is selling something, it does not automatically make it legal, nor does it indemnify you, if it is not illegal. Unfortunately, as in all business there are a few bad apples out there that are willing to risk their reputations and their business to make a few quick bucks. If a provider tells you that the anime/toon images they offer come from Japan, and it is ok to use them, because the Japanese artists do not care, run, do not walk from this provider because that is simply a lie. Japanese artists are very aware of the theft of their artwork and many are now utilizing the Bourne Convention (http://www.law.cornell.edu/treaties/berne/overview.html) to actively prosecute offenders throughout the world.

I hope this has helped clear up some of the confusion about anime vs. cartoons, and as always I am more than happy to answer any questions you may have on the subject. You can always find me through my sites.

Article written by Bestat

http://www.exclusivecontent.com

Pop Up Consoles Work – To A Point

Date: 2011.02.24 | Category: Promotion | Response: 0

As webmasters we are constantly thinking up new ways to generate sales to our sponsors however, the one medium to generating sales that has been and most likely will remain to be popular is the method of using consoles on our sites. Whether these are exit consoles, blur consoles or, on entry consoles one thing holds true, the more consoles you use, the more you annoy your surfer.

Marketing Console Numbers.

Through some research of my own i have noticed that a trend appears when the use of consoles on our sites takes effect this trend is that anything after the first console you use actually cuts your chances of making a sale in half, thus, the maximum amount of pop up consoles we should use on our sites, in my humble opinion should be two or three at the very most.

Console Sales Figures.

Okay lets take a look at some average (signups per month divided by days in the month) sales figures based on a three month period (sending roughly 10,000 hits per month).

Average signups to sponsor (A) = 113
Sales From Console (1) to sponsor (A) = 11
Sales From Console (2) to sponsor (A) = 2

The setup above uses pop up consoles in the following manner, on entering the site you get a Blur Console which hides itself behind the current page you are viewing, once you close the current page you see the blur console, once you close the blur console you see a smaller console, once you close the smaller console, the browser window closes altogether.

Evaluating The Figures.

From the above figures we can see an immediate pattern, namely that console (1) makes up roughly 10% of our total sales and also that console (2) makes up roughly 20% of console (1) sales. Putting these figures into practice across further consoles will show you that by utilizing any more than 3 consoles on your sites really does not amount to any significant raise in sales unless you send a higher amount of traffic to your sites in the first instance.

Console Sales – Recap.

We have now seen that from a steady flow of traffic over a monthly period we can influence the potency of specific consoles within our exit chains and, by analyzing the figures we get from these consoles we can almost certain figure out firstly, the correct (or comfortable) amount of consoles we use on our sites and secondly, that the more consoles we add to our sites, the lower the potential sales figures will be from each subsequent console.

I will be the first person to admit that overall pop up consoles are an excellent marketing tool however, the figures above show that the more consoles we use, the less chance we have of making a sale further down the chain, use consoles wisely and they will benefit you however, abuse the use of pop up consoles on your sites and not only will be wasting bandwidth, youll be wasting a surfer too.

Article written by Lee

Community Forum Scripts

Date: 2011.02.21 | Category: Scripts | Response: 0

Whether you have little or much traffic one thing that will enable you to benefit greater form this traffic is giving your surfers the sense that they are part of a ‘community’ much like the message boards built around adult webmasters have the feel of a community to them your surfers will end up staying around a lot longer if you can give them a reason to come back to your site over anyone else’s.

That said, one of the main factors in starting your own little porn community is the need to have a place where all the ‘action’ take place. What better way than you own message forum.

However, we hit our first problem, having never thought about starting a forum up before you wouldn’t know where to go to look for scripts or, what the best one is. That’s the reason behind this little guide.

Below you will find a short breakdown of the more commonly used message forum scripts along with a short list of features each one has to offer you when choosing to build your own online community.

VBulletin http://www.vbulletin.com

This is actually quite a good forum script, most of the main forums on the web use either VBulletin or PhpBB when it comes to threaded forums. VBulletin uses MySQL and .php to run the actual forum and, set-up of it can become a little tricky if you want to customize it to your exact needs and color scheme. That said, once you overcome the initial complications in setting the forum script up it is easy to handle and, with a price tag of only $160.00 its an affordable option for many.

Ultimate Bulletin Board http://www.infopop.com

Unlike VBulletin UBB uses Perl programming for the forum script which, means you can install it on any cgi enabled host. However, the one main drawback with this script is that it uses flat text files to store all the data which, can sometimes bog down your server with unnecessary file calls. The cost of $199.00 however can be a bit to expensive for most webmasters.

Ikon Board http://www.ikonboard.com

Ikon board is a nice little threaded forum script and, the fact that it is free to download makes it even more so however, even though it uses MySQL for the backend or, choose to store your data in flat text files this script just seems a little to ‘basic’ looking for my personal taste. That said, there are many types of site using IkonBoard so the script must be good enough for them to be using it. Then again, maybe its the price tag of $0.00 that has made this a popular choice.

PhpBB http://www.phpbb.com

PhpBB is probably the most well known free forum script on the web today, its easy to customize (within reason) supports php and MySQL functions yet seems to offer nothing in return. The basics of a forum are there however, every webmaster and their closest friend seems to be using this script. The whole idea of building up a community is so that your site can stand out from the crowd, in my humble opinion, the script does what it is supposed to but, it doesn’t offer any redeeming qualities to your site.

Site Net BBS http://www.focalmedia.net

Sitenet BBS, formally known as Netboard, is probably one of the better Perl based forum scripts on the market, it price tag of $69.00 makes it an affordable choice for almost everyone and, the installation process itself is VERY simple to understand. The one drawback that i have found with this forum script however is that it stores the data in flat text file which actually slow the server down quite a lot making connections to the forum time-out on numerous occasions. However customization of the script is very easy using only HTML based templates you do not need any additional programming skills and, it has a nice interface with a few good features. For the price it is well worth a look. They also offer a freeware version however the links on the bottom of the forum become annoying after a while.

In summary there are a lot of popular forum scripts available for webmasters to start using some are free other require payment ALL have a range of different functions available in them.

Before looking at installing any of the scripts you should always try a demo first to see which one has the features and benefits you would like to offer your community members.

If you can get your base community built up on a forum they enjoy using then all the rest of your marketing should pay off in dividends long term.

Article written by Lee.