CoinTalk Hitting all of the Targets

Hitting all the Targets

When I founded CoinTalk.org in the fall of 2002, I simply wanted to provide an alternative to the USENET newsgroup that I had been participating in, as an escape to the burgeoning load of spam and trolling that are ubiquitous in an unmoderated newsgroup.  I’m amazed at how far it has come.

In fact, until recently I didn’t really have any plans for it at all.  In fact, in 2004, I even thought of just closing it down because it was becoming more of a pain than anything, and wasn’t catching on fast enough.  Thank God I kept at it.

The community is over 15,000 strong now, and more importantly it’s 15,000 of the right kind of members as well.  We’ve written over 440,000 posts.  Uploaded countless images of coins, both common and rare.  It’s become what most would consider an invaluable resource to numismatists and coin collectors.

My main goals going forward are to increase membership and traffic to the site.  Enabling members to more easily spread the word is the primary tactic.  Also, creating a wider array of resources and tools to allow collectors and numismatists to explore and learn about the hobby is at the top of the goal list.

I’m more optimistic about Coin Talk now than ever, and looking forward to where 2009 will take the community.

Online Community Platforms

When I first started building online communitiies, there wasn’t much choice.  For me, the choice came down to phpBB and vBulletin, though there were a few others.  They were, and still are, fairly basic message board software.  And, I do have to say that neither of them has evolved much over the years since I launched my first online community (in 2002).

I do try to keep up with what new platforms are becoming popular, what’s on the horizon and such.  And, for a practical reason as well.  I’ve mentioned that the platform I use has not evolved with the times, and over the past year I’ve gone from having a portfolio of over a dozen communities on the vBulletin platform now to just three or four.  Three if you count only the ones that have actual communities on them.

Look at all the options available now.  I’ve been looking at Ning, Community Server, Expression Engine, and many others.  I just found one called KickApps today.  I got a start at a new community site with Expression Engine, but then heard about the upcoming new version of EE and decided that I should just wait and get the ball rolling when that is out instead of doing it once and doing it again when the new version comes.

But that presents me with a problem.  After so many years of developing online communities using vBulletin as a platform, my eyes are open to the new possibilities yet there are so many good choices that I’m having trouble settling into one.  I’m comfortable developing with vBulletin, and that provides some drag with making the decision.

What has really been helpful in the past is seeing what others have done before.  What have you built with an online community platform?  When I visit one of the software company websites I usually click around to see if they have a portfolio where they list client sites.  Some do, some don’t, some have just a few listed.  A lot of them just list corporate sites and those don’t fascinate me so much as the ones that individual developers build.  You know, if Coke or Nike is developing an online community there’s millions going into it and the way I see it is that it just has to look good, and if it doesn’t there’s a serious problem there.  But, if the platform can allow for smaller companies or individual developers to build something great, then that’s the kind of platform that gets me excited.

If Jelsoft thought like this, I might still like vBulletin

I used to evangelize for their brand. Now, I’m trying to get rid of that bitter taste they’ve left in my mouth by dumping my vBulletin licenses, and moving on to other services that compete with them.

Zealot.com Crowdgather Merger

About the Zealot.com Deal

This is one of my longest term projects.  I’ve put a ton of heart and effort into building up this community to where it is today.  As it stands, Zealot.com has over 30,000 members all of whom are very zealous about their hobby.

And what a bumpy road it was.  Along the way there were numerous points when I thought I would loose everything, or ready to just throw in the towel.  Thank goodness I kept with it.  I’m very proud of what I accomplished with Zealot.com and that I didn’t let the community down in the end.

I won’t go into much detail about the transaction, other than to say they paid 50% cash, and the other 50% in equity.  So, I remain involved with Zealot.com, but now there is an incredible support team involved that can do much more than I ever could on my own.

And, that leads to why I choose this time to transact with Zealot.com.  It may have been overdue.  For some time I felt that my technical skills were holding back the community from climbing to the next level.  In fact, if Zealot.com were the only project I had on my plate, I am sure I would not have had to worry about it.  Juggling multiple projects often meant that all of them got second class treatment, and now that’s not a concern anymore for Zealot.com.

The BloggerTalk.com Relaunch

BloggerTalk Gets a Facelift

I put a bunch of work into BloggerTalk.com over the past few weeks.  It had been a while since I took the time to do any work at all with BT, so it was well overdue.

BloggerTalk.com is a community that I launched in 2003, focused on building community among bloggers and allowing a neutral platform for the exchange of information.  Over the years it has grown slowly to almost 19,000 members.

This summer I took up the project again and refreshed the look of the site and added a front-end to the community using Wordpress.  It’s far from being where I’d like to take it though.  I would like to recruit people interested in blogging to participate by submitting news features, tutorials, and other content useful to people who blog.

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