My First Golf Forum Launched - ChipandChat.com!
August 8, 2006 by
Adam
Filed under
Me & My Life
About a week ago, I went over to the YE.com Forums to see what new topics had been written and to see if I could contribute to what anyone was saying. I stumbled upon a post written by a teenager called Fraz asking whether there were any decent golf forums around.
The idea of starting a golf forum has always been something I have toyed with, ever since I bought the domain name www.GolfChum.com. I have had numerous ideas for it including a golf blog network and the forum, but I decided to finally make the program as it was something I hadn’t done before, and so it seemed cool and original.
Anyway, I responded to Fraz and told him that there were popular golf forums on the net, but most of which were poorly designed or lacked regular posting.
To my pleasure, another boy called James replied and said he too wanted to start a golf forum, and as a web designer, he was the missing piece in the puzzle! We all got together on MSN (which in my opinion is one of the most important business tools I have on my computer), and discussed domains and plans for the project.
ChipandChat.com was born!
Fraz and I then left James to get on with the designing. Within a few days he had done it and I was superimpressed! You can check out the amazing skin for phpBB at www.chipandchat.com. After a bit more further coding the forum was complete and all three of us gave our first introductory posts. All we have to do now is get the forum up and running.
This can be a tricky procedure. If there are too few posts then people will be less inclined to join and register up, as there will be no threads to participate in. Generally speaking (and most forum managers know this), the more posts there are, the more members you will get. I know its a Catch 22 situation, but dedication and commitment are what’s required at the start of any website.
What are the goals of the forum? In time I hope to build up a large database of golfers, and it will be this which will help get GolfChum of the ground especially as we roll out new versions. Also, I just love golf (I played golf today in fact), and therefore want to use my entrepreneurial skills to fuel this passion and create something that I’ll be proud of in a few years time.
If you’re a fan of golf, a keen golfer, a lazy golfer, a wannabe golfer or just like to chat in a community then ChipandChat.com is for you! Register now and become part of the golfing family!
Getting to that critical mass stage of having enough posts to attract new members is very difficult, and I don’t think I’ve ever really managed it on any of the forums I’ve run in the past (even Rogue Students has 10,000 posts but only five or six active members).
I like the custom phpBB skin though, definitely suits the topic of the site.
Thanks Paul, the skin was designed by James (one of the trio), and I was ecstatic when I saw it for the first time.
To be honest though, phpBB is very limited and the only reason we went for it was because it was free. We will probably upgrade to VBulletin once the revenue starts coming in for the site.
And we’re trying to up the postage so as to attract the browser into registering. As for your forum, it seems you’ve got a wealth of information there, but I think 165 members isn’t really enough for a truly successful forum. DId it take you long to reach this amount of members? Also at first did it take a long time for the initial members to start joining? I just want to know what Im in for for ChipandChat!
Thanks for commenting Paul.
I know the feeling about phpBB - I used to run vBulletin on Rogue Students and it was so much nicer, but it was costing me money for the licence each year and for the two plugins I used (photo gallery and links directory) so I had to switch to phpBB instead. I think that eventually I’m going to have to write my own forum system because there isn’t one out there that really does what I want and will link in with other features such as photo galleries.
There aren’t actually that many members on Rogue Students, about 100 of those listed are spam registrations that I end up purging every week or so. Unfortunately phpBB doesn’t seem to have a decent way of deleting accounts so I have to do them manually through phpMyAdmin. It really is a poor piece of software in many ways but it’s all that I have at the moment.
The forums have been running in some way, shape or form for about three years now, so I guess growth has been slow. It didn’t take very long for people to sign up but that was mostly because they’re all friends from college/university, although there’s only a few who post regularly and it’s probably just turned into a discussion between old friends more than anything else. I think once I add more sticky features such as a photo gallery people will start coming back.
Yeah the license is a bit costly, but I suppose you get what you pay for in terms of features, usablity and behind-the-scenes administration.
But writing your own forum will be a whole lot easier, tell me if you do it, I would love to test it out!
Oh right, I didn’t realise that spam accounts weren’t easy to delete, that may be a problem with C&C! But there’s no other choice. Its like the Paypal argument: we have to use it because there’s no other widely used payment processor like it.
Im anticipating a quick growth of the forum but after that who knows, it may stop and slow down, or it might grow exponentially even more. I suppose having a place to talk for free with friends isn’t such a bad thing. Do you monetize the site? I suppose you’re not really going to make that much with 160 members, but I just added my Adsense and I want to know what to expect.
Also what are the best ad positions for forums? You helped me out with this blog, so you might have further recommendations.
Thanks again for your great insight!
It’s not really the cost of the licence that bothers me, but things like the fact that it’s controlled by a company who can hike the price up or get bought out (as happened to the people making the photo gallery plugin) and the fact that it’s a recurring cost if you want updates. I got stung to an extent by that, and I also don’t like not having the ability to release improvements back to the community.
Spam accounts aren’t too difficult to delete, but the main problem is that they really shouldn’t show up in the first place - the reason spammers create them is because they show up in the membership list with a link to their website/profile, so it’s just like comment spam in that respect. I really would expect phpBB to have some functionality to combat this by now, or at least to delete any accounts that hadn’t been activated within 14 days. You can do this easily through phpMyAdmin, but that’s not an excuse. I’d write something myself but I don’t have time to learn how phpBB’s database interaction and mods system work.
As for making money, I did use to run AdSense in the top right corner, opposite the vBulletin logo (a 468×60 banner). I don’t think it made much, although this was before URL channels were introduced and I wasn’t watching my earnings very closely back then either. Once the whole site structure is setup with more features then I may add some features to bring in revenue (I have a lot of ideas on paper, the hard part is obviously getting them coded), but for the moment it’s just a free forum for old friends to chat on.
Ad positions is a trick one, I don’t think they work too well on forums anyway because people aren’t looking to leave your site, instead they want to read the content. With a lot of posts being general chit chat, I can’t see a contextual ad programme such as AdSense delivering relevant ads, so you might have to use generic banners instead (e.g. I’d probably have ones for Play.com DVDs or something).
If you want to discuss it further or ask anything else, just drop me a line via email and I’ll be happy to help.
Adnan,
This sounds great! I have a couple of comments regarding Golf Chum (which I’ll email to you later), but so far so good! Looking forward to checking out Chip and Chat.
Brian
Hey Brian, hows your idea going? Has it taken on physical form yet, because I would love to see it!
I hope you can join up on ChipandChat to add to our database of golfers!
Looking forward to your email!
Wow, i actually thought i’ve commented on this but nevertheless i realised i haven’t.
I think you’ve got yourself a great niche there adnan and i think your gonig to have great success with it. I think eventually i am gonig to join because, i like golf and i like you guys who run it :)(that always helps), so when i’ve got the time i’m gonig to join becuase, once i join i want to be an active and resourceful member of the communtiy and develop my knowledge of golf further and help other newbies to it too!
Haha thanks anyway Nick for commenting now!
I think in terms of niche, although there is quite a bit of competition, competition is healthy. I think what my site has which others don’t, is the great skin and automatic community feel once you enter the forum.
You can join whenever you like Nick, the sooner the better! We would all love to hear from you and would love to help you develop your love for the game!
Hey! Thanx for this beautiful place of the Inet!!