Author Topic: AK's Forum  (Read 1706 times)

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Offline Lola

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AK's Forum
« on: March 07, 2012, 10:02:56 AM »
Tell the members here a bit about your forum.  They may want to meet a few more furkid friends.   HeadButt

http://www.ak49bwl.com/forum
« Last Edit: March 07, 2012, 06:57:47 PM by Lola, Reason: Forgot the link... »
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Offline AK49BWL

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Re: AK's Forum
« Reply #1 on: March 07, 2012, 12:23:53 PM »
Oh if you insist, wonderful new member of said forum... (Hehehe )

My forum is currently home to several members of a has-been cat forum, i-love-cats.com. That place is so spammed out with ads and buggy at best, so I invited the members to use mine... History made -- So I've got a good number of cat lovers and all-around really good people on my forum... People I'd do nearly anything for. I'd sooner say we're more like a tight-knit family than a group of friends :)

Any and all of you, feel free to join! I very much enjoy running my site and hope it continues to work well :)

http://www.ak49bwl.com/forum

Much longer post here:

My site started mostly as something for me to play with, waaay back in January of 2009.. Then got a little attention when it became a place where some of my friends from other sites (truck forums and deviantart.com) could chat with me on IRC. The forum didn't start until nearly 5 months later, when I thought hmmm... Since I'm doing all this, why not try a forum for my members too? Not that I really had any members... LOL. But I wanted to mess around with a forum anyway, because at the time, I knew next to nothing about web server programming languages, and wanted to learn... Thankfully HTML was never a problem, so creating the site was easy. As I learned more about how the forum worked, I started programming other pages... The largest by far being my videos pages.. That one is my pride and joy lol, wrote that entire set of pages from scratch, and still very actively maintain it.

Anyway.... My forum remained pretty dead until fairly recently.. Late July of last year. At that time, the only cat forum I was a part of was i-love-cats.com... And it was starting to seriously tick me off. For one, the site would just up and decide to not load, and it seemed to be a regional problem... It wouldn't load for me in Alaska, but worked fine for someone in say, Texas, at the same time of day. Or the UK. Or it'd die for them and be okay for me... Made things very difficult. To make matters worse, the administrator of the site does not appear to care (to this day even). Which brings me to my other severe dislike about that site... Ads. Ads, all OVER the place. 18 ad networks as of my last count a couple days ago. And they fly around as you "attempt" to browse the site, and if you try to get rid of them you end up clicking them.... Just ugh. Adblock Plus became my friend very quickly after joining there lol. It's obvious, to me anyway, that the site is only there to collect ad revenue, and it's near impossible to browse without an ad blocker (and literally impossible to browse on a smartphone.. Try it sometime!).

Soooo, anyway (I have severe A.D.D. so forgive my post drift LOL), ILC started to fail randomly... So I asked several of the most active members there if they'd like to use my forum as a backup for when ILC had its outages. The I-Love-Cats Life Raft was born! And suddenly, my forum's overall post count started rising quite quickly lol. Then the ILC admin did something, and suddenly ILC seemed okay for a while starting in November... And then, November 16, the site died completely. One member managed to get an email from the admin saying they had been hacked and lost data. This member was not me, even though I am the ONLY moderator on that site, and sent MANY messages to the admin. It stayed down... Seemingly for good. I'd check the site every day, then every other day, then once a week, then........Screw it, I simply don't care anymore. Things were going well on my forum, and all of my favorite members were there already. We didn't need ILC anymore :)

Fast forward to February 10th. Received an email from ILC saying that basically, it's back. But has lost all data from May 12, 2011 onward. And is still full of ad-spam. ILC used to be a site I'd check on a regular basis, several times a day even. Now, they're lucky to see me once a day. Some of the new members there have already come on over to my forum and discovered the lack of junk. Ha, that reminds me, the admin of ILC would even spam her own forum with crappy articles that were misleading at best...

So now, my forum is more of a tight-knit family than a group of friends I think... I'd do near anything to keep my site running for them all... And may end up having to get a remote host soon because my home's internet is getting to be a bit too limited -- Ooh, I didn't mention that part about the website's server being 10 feet from me at the foot of my bed? Haha. Yeah. Powered up computer 24/7, thankfully it's a quiet machine lol.

Anyway, I openly welcome any and all of you to join up if you want! It's a pretty basic deal with no real sections aside from the ILC Life Raft, but I'm very much enjoying the high amount of activity that ILC's failure has brought me
Brandon

Offline Lola

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Re: AK's Forum
« Reply #2 on: March 07, 2012, 12:37:29 PM »
If you post a smiley from your forum here...that makes it "Free" to steal.  Right?   :D
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Offline AK49BWL

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Re: AK's Forum
« Reply #3 on: March 07, 2012, 12:38:06 PM »
absolutely lol. I didn't exactly ask for permission to use them myself funny2 (and truthfully don't even remember anymore where a lot of them came from!)
Brandon

Offline Lola

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Re: AK's Forum
« Reply #4 on: March 07, 2012, 06:52:57 PM »
absolutely lol. I didn't exactly ask for permission to use them myself funny2 (and truthfully don't even remember anymore where a lot of them came from!)

Most of mine were obtained legally.   >:D 
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Offline Lola

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Re: AK's Forum
« Reply #5 on: March 07, 2012, 06:55:42 PM »
PS
I checked out the other forum you mentioned.  I can TOTALLY understand your pizzed-off-ness about the ads.  Ewww...and some of them move too. 
Everything you NEED to know about caring for your feline. www.catinfo.org

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