Lots of different software is available..and priceing extends from free to $30,000.

Often the question of which is *the best* gets raised. Anyone who tells you only one forum solution is *the best* for each and every sort of community is someone who does not understand how web communities work.

So here is my opinionated--but true statement (grin)

There is NO one size fits all solution.

What is BEST will depend upon your goals, the sorts of discussions you hope to have, who the people are you want to attract etc..

My suggestion is that you consider your goals and vision and then participate in forums similar to your which use *different* software to get a sense of how the software effects the spririt and style of the community and its interaction. When you think you are interested in a certain software--be sure to go to a number of LIVE sites using it and participate in the discussions there and see what it is like


A good starting point for developing YOUR criteria for bbs software is:

David Wooley's article "Choosing Conferencing Software" http://thinkofit.com/webconf/wcchoice.htm


He really doe snot push any particular forum but helps you think about options and what you need. The page links to HUGE list of links to different sites for forum software.

Again I'd encourage people looking for a good system not to get caught up in any particular feature of a software package but rather get a feel for the sort of environment it helps to create.

If you are in the midst of exploring possibilities and comparing claims made by different software developers..this would be a good place to post your questions.

I would ask folks not to use this merely to reccommend their favorite but to help posters pick the *best* for their situation.

renee

We are planning an off site advertising of our services and products in USA county newspapers. Can you advise me on price range their ? Or did anyone use their services before ? Was it effective for you?

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[Note: This message has been edited by Janet Berg]

I'm looking for help on getting more subscribers.

I run the ONLY proper South Park newsletter around, yet I only have 300 subs or so. I receive around 2700 main page uniques a day, with around 300 of them being return visitors.

How can I get more subs? My site is in a format where I write an update "in." etc. "I updated the sounds section blah blah blah", and under every update I now have a small box saying "sign up" for the newsletter.

But I still don't get many subscriptions. It's annoying because the newsletter is weekly and I have to work hard to bring it out. Any help would be great thanks.

Millasur ~

The contest page is http://www.vbexplorer.com/contest/

Anyway contest 2 and 3 are basic programming contests. Contest 1 is a free drawing -nothing remarkable so far- but these three plus contest 4 together seem to be doing a good job of creating some good traffic.

Contest 4 works somewhat on the iWon.com principal -they give you points for specific links and pages you view, we give points for visits to the site and for finding a 'bonus' link once per day per person. At the end of this contest we will select a random winner using the total points as 'chances' (like a raffle)- so if you have collected 400 points you'd have 400 chances of winning basically.

What this has done is encourage people to return to the site up to 5 times per day (to get the max points allowed) and then they view an average of 5-15 pages to find the random popup 'bonus 50' points.

Some interesting stats. The entries for contest 1 are almost exactly 4x greater than that for contest 4. I'm guessing that a lot of people don't like to search around. However contest 4 by getting people to come back to get points has generated a substantial number of extra page views -about 3x as many page views as that generated by entering contest 1. I don't have an accurate way to tell how many additional pages are viewed site wide because of either contest and we did implement some other non-contest improvements but with the contests and other improvments combined we have almost a 30% increase in page views for the week.

If you have suggestions or have done something similar please post your experiences here as we probably will refine these contests based on what we learn from this one.

The system give you control of the traffic to your website in real time. i.e. you can see the visitors movements around your site, their host, refferer, browser, etc.

It is also a chatt system, that allows the users to chatt with a company representative. You can also request to chatt with a visitor when he is on your site.

We feel that this is a revolution in customer contact and thus worthy your attention. During the past weeks we have got many new customers with Human Click.

There is a competing system from www.liveperson.com , but they want 500US start up and 250US per month and operator.
Only difference is customable graphics and ability to launch pop-up windows to surfers.

HumanClick, is like ICQ, from Israel and free to use. Multiple operators are allowed.
I strongly belive that this is the future.

Where the log analyzis is telling you what happened yesterday, human click tells you what is happening right now and give you a chance to communicate with your visitors.

When we get a Pizza leaflet through the door we usually pick it up and ditch it without further concern. It is actually easier to dump junk email than having to dump junk normal mail. With a little experience it is easy to spot spam email, and filters can be set up so why are people going crazy about it to the extent they are?

The New York Times will cost far more than the Chitinonga local rag.

Advertising in papers in Salt lake City will cost more at the moment than in three months time.

try adding some selling pitch and let people know what is in the mailing.

also I would suggest you shorten the home page a bit into a few, better for SE rank and for the reader. same with the menu

Plus, there have been estimates that spam wastes about 3,000,000 gigs of bandwidth a year. Who knows if this number is correct, but the truth is huge anyways. So lets save the bandwidth and make the Web a little faster.

I've decided to put the human click image only on one page. That page will be an ask the experts page and I'm going to try and recruit 4-5 cavy experts to use human click so if someone goes to my page they can talk one on one with a cavy expert!

I get about 8 pieces of junk email a day and it takes almost no time to delete them. It's growing rapidly, but its still a very, very minor problem.

By the way, I NEVER ask to have my name removed from any list.

and yes, it is good to keep people on your site, but I was refering to counting them as unique visitors

How long have you had these on your site?

Got it on all the pages on two sites.

I think it would be great if we got a disscussion about strategies and experiences about these kind of tools. Mikkel and I have been talking alot about it on our ICQ, but it's better we do it here.