MyBB Community Forums

classifiedbilliards.com is a billiards (pool and snooker) forum with a focus on pool and snooker equipment and equipment manufacturers.



We offer:

• General discussion about pool and snooker
  
• Tournament information
  
• Listings of custom cue manufacturers and repair
  
• A Wanted/Trade/For Sale area
  
• Raffles for members (for real things - like cues)
  

The site is 5 months old and has had a bit of a shaky start, but we hope to set that right. The member base is small at the moment but we are working on our promotional activities:

• We have a ton of business cards made with the site logo and the site owners are handing them out at local pool clubs
  
• By the end of August we will be offering live video streaming from local clubs
  
• We are in contact with some pool players and well known custom cue makers. We will be doing a series of interviews and publishing to the forum
  
• Our biggest need right now is forum activity - for that reason we have installed the New Points plugin and will be using that for a monthly raffle where the raffle spots are bought using forum points. The raffle item will have a value of around 10 - 15 dollars, so not bad.
  

The forum theme and layout:

• Uses Xthreads filtering urls to reduce the need for sub-forums but still offering the flexibility of filters. Example
  
• The theme is a hackup of JustinS Apart Leaf theme with a fancy header menu and navigation bar from one of Themefreak's free themes. Thanks to both of them for the opportunity to use their very nice themes.
  
• The site homepage is integrated into the rest of the forum using the excellent portal as homepage tutorial by Pavemen.
  
• As I discovered that IE7 hates checking passwords we have a fancy sign up page that requires no password check - thanks to Tomm and Brad T for their work on that
  
• Profiles - yetii tabs by me. Kind of cute. (see attached image)
  
• WTF forum layout from RateU at mybbhacks. Thank you RateU.
  
• Some of you guys might remember this forum from a couple of weeks ago, I think you might not recognise it though.
  

Nearly forgot: Site url: http://www.classifiedbilliards.com/index.php

Great forum IMO! Everything looks great from the theme, to the nice features you have there, as well. I can't really say anything but great job, and good luck with the forum.

Di you really use over 500 sub-forums? Just curious.

The theme doesn't fits my tastes but it is definitely not bad at all. Also, you have many custom work around the forum, that makes it fairly unique.

Good luck

Lol no, we do not have 500 sub-forums. He USED to have over 500 forums, this is the trimmed down version. I just did not renumber everything.

Yea, the theme is ok, we have a lot of older members who don't really know their way around a PC. Like a LOT are still on IE6 and 7.... So I had to make it look nice but keep it plain. Fancy stuff? They get lost

Nice home page, I think everyone should use the portal. I also like the sign up page, I was stoped at the security question as I had no clue. I don't know if you don't want new pool players or if that is a super easy question and I just know nothing. Thats also cool about the buissness cards. At first I didn't like the simple nav bar/menu links deal but It's not a tech forum, so for the pool users simple is probably better. Nothing really I could suggest to do better except getting members. Not sure what your doing now but there has to be somewhere online where there is pool players but no forum. I would try looking on YouTube, maybe there is a popular pool shooter and you guys could partner up and he could advertisise/promote and of all the blogs surely there is a pool guy you could talk to. Just some ideas, I'm thinking there is not many pool forums so maybe people will be interested easily. Looks better and once again good luck

Yeah that security question is insane. You could probably get away with "What color is an 8-ball?" Easy enough that everyone knows it but tough enough to keep spambots out.

You've made huge improvements here. Congrats.

Any reason you decided to keep the agreement page intact?

Hmm, which security question was that? There are 3 and so you can change the question. Yes, one of them IS "what colour is the 8 ball" I have changed them to easier ones, but really, how can anyone not know what the pink ball is worth

On the menu and general style - I agree it is a bit blocky and I have tried various menus. On my personal site I have drop down menus; after a while using them I am not convinced on drop downs as again they hide content in layers. My goal on this site is to try and keep as much as possible on the top layer and so use a menu structure very similar to MYBB's own. As we are very small I suppose I could activate the forum jump - I always turn that off if on a shared host.

Promotion is key on this site - there is a BIG forum - VBulletin - and they have all the pool players. We do have a plan for that though, so I just need to push the other admins.

Memo to self: Do NOT do it all yourself

@brad - on the agreement page, that was kept because the current owner wanted it. I can see his point (kind of) that we need somewhere where we can sell the site a bit AND have the registration agreement visible(ish) though I also see that the two click can be a barrier.

Right now I have three pages that do seem to overlap a bit - the home page (goal and intro) and benefits of membership (the agreement page) and to a certain extent the subscriber page. I think that with a bit of thought I can get that down to two pages - home page and subscriber and lose the "benefits" page (aka the agreement) so we can go straight to the point when joining up.

Thank you all for the input so far.

EDIT: I am torn between ONE question and no need to change it or giving three options for the question.

Congratulations Lee, really nice theme and with various features

why is there a twitter logo in the forum descriptions?

Lol, I am playing with twitter - I am not sure on the forumbit because it is making it look cluttered. There SHOULD be a tool tip saying that new threads are posted to twitter. I did not really want to just post threads to twitter without letting people know it could happen, so that is the purpose.

I am using mybb publisher for it, and I have already made a request to Pavemen to see if that can be made an option (to choose if the thread gets posted to twitter) then I can put that in the new thread or something. I think people should be allowed to choose if I tweet it or not.

I am really not sure that all this is really adding any value to the site as most of our users don't even have twitter. Forum owner wants it though