ForumSpark Support

What are some of your favorite events on your forums to get activity going?

What success stories do we know about forums that closed and then re-opened? Is it rare? What makes it a success story?

I've been checking my small forum analytics and honestly it's not encouraging. You create threads, reply yourself sometimes, even share links on WhatsApp groups. I even boosted one post with $50 last month thinking it would attract crowd. It was just three people that registered and one was probably a spam bot from India. i’m starting to believe the first 100 members don't usually come from ads but from disturbing your friends personally.

Everyone’s got a story. Maybe it was a niche you were passionate about, or maybe you just wanted to build a community from scratch. What got you into forums in the first place?

If a forum owner offered you a paid community manager position, what would you provide as the community manager?

Feel free to list the amounts of pay versus what sort of services you would provide.

For example, I used to get paid $1,000 a month to be a CM for a very popular copywriting blog. I would post an interesting topic daily, engage with members daily, post an article weekly, and do a live Zoom accountability meeting monthly. To me, that was well worth the $1K.

So, for how much would you provide, and what would you provide, as the Community Manager on a forum?

What are some of the things you regret doing in your past?

I’ve seen a couple of users confused by v1 and v2 theme and extension uses. I recommend either adding labels for v1/v2 themes and extensions or creating a subforum for v1 themes and extensions, while keeping all the latest-version resources in the main forum.

How often do you change themes on your forum?

Do you ask your members before you change a theme, or do you assume they’ll like the change and do it without asking?

Do you think many admins want change more than actual members when it comes to different forum themes?

I was thinking on the online list it shows guests and ip addresses. Under the IP address, could you have it show if it’s a direct hit or the site that they came from via link? So if they found your forum on Spark Promotion in would show guest, IP, and SparkPromotion.net. Also could each user(member/guest) have a drop down list that shows all of the forum they viewed while they were visiting? So maybe it would just show index but in the drop down list, if they visited 5 different topics, it would show all of the topics the viewed?

I think this would help users see where traffic is coming from and what interests visitors.

This has been an ongoing project for over a year now. A while ago, I started redoing the website, but with most of my time going into ForumSpark, I never really got around to finishing it properly.

Until now.

AdminBanner has had a pretty big refresh. The entire website has been rebuilt and redesigned, the network pages have been cleaned up, registrations are open again, and I’ve tried to make the whole thing a lot easier to understand for someone discovering it for the first time. But there’s always room for improvement.

For those who haven’t seen it before, AdminBanner is basically an old-school banner exchange with a more modern setup behind it.

You add your website, upload a 728×90 banner and place a small embed code somewhere on your site. Every time you display a banner from another member, you earn an impression back for your own banner elsewhere in the network.

I’ve also leaned quite heavily into the older-web feel with the redesign. Banner exchanges, topsites, webmaster communities and independently run websites used to be everywhere, and AdminBanner was originally inspired by that era. I wanted the new version to feel a little more like that rather than another completely flat corporate website.

It also now has installation guides for platforms including ForumSpark, XenForo, Invision, phpBB and WordPress, so adding it to a community takes very little work.

The exchange itself remains completely free. There are a few optional premium extras if someone wants things like additional impressions, more banners or removing ads from their own site, but you don't need any of that to participate.

If you run a forum, blog or independent website and have a little 728×90 space available, feel free to throw your site into the network.

https://adminbanner.com/

https://forums.adminbanner.com/

If you’re thinking of joining Admin Banner and you need a banner that’s 728×90, I’m willing to create one free for the next 5 people who are going to sign up on Admin Banner and have a Forum Spark community. Just message me and give me the details 🙂

And if you want to take a crack at making your own banner, my friend @Jay says that Claude AI can do that now! Upload your logo, what you want to say and tell it size and colors and you should get good results!

In general, what features are most forum platforms missing?

What would make forums way better?

Every forum from the early 2000s worth its salt had an arcade: a page of small games, a high score table, and one member who would not let go of the top spot. ForumSpark boards can have one again, and it is the headline of this release. The Arcade is openThe Arcade is a free extension you install from the Extensions page. It comes with 55 games ready to play: puzzle, action, cards, classics and skill games, all running on your board in a sandboxed frame, nothing to download, nothing to configure...

Continue reading on the blog

A game room for your community. Members play bundled HTML5 games right on the board, chase personal bests, and take the crown on each machine.

Features

• 55 bundled games - Puzzle, classics, action, cards and skill games, ready to play

• Crowns - The best score on every game wears the crown, and losing it sends a notification

• Leaderboards - All time and this week, per game and across the arcade

• Hall of Fame - Who holds the most crowns

• Widgets - Champions, top games and latest scores anywhere on your board

• Fair play - Server side sessions, minimum play times and score caps keep the boards honest

Install through your ACP => Extension Directory

Please use this topic for bugs, support or requests.

What are your fears about migrating to a new platform?

I enabled the arcade and I’ve got the link in the menu but whenever I try and go to

https://sparkpromotion.net/arcade

It tries going to

https://forumspark.net/arcade/

I’ve tried it on my phone and my laptop.

@Cedric

Azure is now available in the marketplace.

A cool, bright, friendly theme in the spirit of the mid-2000s portals like Pixel2Life: a sky gradient with soft white swoosh lines, one clean white sheet, glass navigation tabs and a green welcome band. Modern underneath, nostalgic on the surface.Two-hue color system. Pick Classic, Ember or Berry, or set your own sky and accent colors. Members can choose their own pairing if you allow it.Welcome b...

View the product, screenshots and reviews

Use this topic for questions and discussion.

What would make you want to quit forums altogether?

Have you ever taken a break from them?

I’d like to suggest adding a Video Gallery feature to ForumSpark, similar to the existing Media Gallery, but specifically designed for sharing and organising videos.

The Video Gallery could allow members to submit videos from platforms such as YouTube, rather than having to upload the actual video file directly to the forum.

💡 How it could work

Members could add a video by simply pasting a YouTube link. ForumSpark would automatically retrieve information such as:

• 🎥 Video thumbnail

• 📝 Video title

• 👤 Channel/creator

• 📅 Upload date

• 🔗 Link to the original video

The video could then be displayed directly within the gallery, allowing members to watch it without leaving the forum where possible.

📂 Categories & Organisation

Much like the Media Gallery, administrators could create different categories or albums for videos. For example:

• 🎵 Music Videos

• 🎮 Gaming

• 🎬 Movies & TV

• 😂 Funny Videos

• 📚 Tutorials

• 📰 News & Current Events

• 🌟 Community Videos

This would make it much easier for members to browse videos based on their interests.

❤️ Community Features

The Video Gallery could also include features such as:

• Likes/reactions

• Comments

• Views

• Ratings

• Favourite/save option

• Featured videos

• Most viewed/popular videos

• Recently added videos

Administrators could also have moderation tools to approve, edit or remove submissions.

🚀 Why it would be useful

A Video Gallery would give ForumSpark communities another way to build content and encourage member interaction. Forums often have members sharing YouTube videos, music, tutorials, gaming clips and other video content, so having a dedicated place to organise these would be a useful addition to the existing Media Gallery.

It could essentially be a community-powered video library, while still using external platforms such as YouTube to host the actual videos, meaning ForumSpark wouldn't need to store large video files itself.

I know there is events but i would like to suggest as a future feature to have a Calendar where you can have member birthdays, holidays and other important dates on a calendar, similar to other forum platforms have. Events could be integrated in with it, and there could be widgets where events and birthays ect, could be visible on the board index.

Have you ever dealt with a member who threatens to hurt or kill themselves on your forum?

What did you do as a response?

If this hasn’t happened to you, how would you react?

It says I have 1 new notification but when I go to look there isn’t any new notifications. I mark all read and it goes away, but it comes back later when I revisit the forum after a short while.

Not sure what’s causing it but it’s rather annoying.

I was just thinking, would it be possible to put widgets into categories in place of regular forums?

For example category 1 with 4 forums.

Category 2 with 1-2 widgets.

Category 3 with 2 forums.

Essentially just another spot for widgets.

I've been reworking it extensively and looking for feedback. I changed the layout to a card style. Feel free to actually go to my forum to test it out. I will upload a picture if you don't want to. Just looking for first impressions and feedback, thanks!

What do you think about AI and forums?

Do you think the two can work together? Could AI actually make forums more popular again?

Or do you think AI could be the total death of forums?