4th Anniversary message

Total Raised: £480.32

admin (no pm's please) · Posted: Thu May 28, 2009 8:40 pm Post subject:

It is now 4 years since myff launched.

To recap a little history, a little over four years ago, the parent company MarsJupiter LTD was providing a healthy income, but none of the new projects were getting anywhere fast

I had just taken rather a long sabbatical you might say, dedicating almost all my time and effort to the not for profit community site downsizer.net, all very worthy and something I am incredibly proud to have thought up and been a part of

but all the same not something that could ever pay any bills as it is strictly volunteer work.

Now part of downsizer is a forum, and people on forums have this nasty habit of wanting their own forums

One member was having trouble with a free forum causing me to look at her forum and from there the general free forums market, clearly not only did lots of people want lots of forums, but what they almost always (if not always always) got was rotten to the core.

I could not envisage coding and running anything that would not easily be better than what people were getting. Even if we ended up "bad" we would still be "better".

So about one or two weeks later I had a system coded, and a server rented.

The system was phpbb2 with an in house management system, not some "off the shelf" free forums system. Those systems are part of why free systems are generally so bad.

There was no template editing in those days, if you wanted a logo you provided it and I create template for people manually

That of course was rather good for users in some ways, but also plainly unsustainable.

There was a reason for doing that way though, because whilst you could find "hacks" to let people replace phpbb logos, such hack were inherently limited, from the start I wanted a system that would offer people a whole lot more.

6 months of so later, we gave people full template editing

6 months after that the first tentative "portals" appeared.

Key to a lot of this were the moderators providing their time freely to help members and give feedback on the system, as well as their efforts (Symon in particular) with writing guides, guides that frequently needed updating when features were tweaked. Without the moderators we would not have done anywhere near as well

Key also was the fact that money could be thrown into servers to keep everything running reasonable well. Most free forums systems die in the face of popularity as advertising revenues on forums are really quite woeful. You need a deep pocket and a long term commitment to survive.

So where are we now?

Firstly and most importantly for all our sakes, is that we are running a service that is in the black, it may ease our way forward if people put money into the server appeal, but we are not about to collapse if they don't.

Secondly, we are still developing the system. People waiting for one thing or another (and there is always a list) should take heart in reading the announcements, there is a steady flow of new features and that will continue.

Of special interest at the moment is the "CATALOG" portal that allows things like recipe databases to be easily added to forums. I'm hoping to make this live in a few weeks, please be patient on that one, it is running on downsizer.net currently and it is best to get it fully tested before adding it everywhere.

There are still features like "delete posts, when a user is deleted" that will be added to the phpbb2 system, and work is occurring to get phpbb3 up to speed with extra features. That work though has a little hold on it currently as the next official phpbb3 release is due and there is little point in having to sets of changes to integrate at once.

Anyhow, last but not least my thanks to our members for using the service and being patient when the occasional hiccup occurs.

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