MyBB Community Forums

This is the forum I have been working on for some time. Our forum is based around people who like to play the sims2 and sims3 games, and, as a twist to make us a little bit different, we do a web magazine about design, but we only use pictures from the sims game.

As a real newbie to the MYBB community I realise that our forum is not exactly awesome, and has very little in new features. We have a cheap paid host and we store our pics on photobucket, so we dont need ads to keep the site running, and its our hobby, not a source of income.

I have various plug ins on the forums - themes, advanced portal, myblogs, the shoutbox and thankyou plug in are the big gotta haves for me.

I have used the afresh series by Justin S and also modified the appearance of a couple of themes. I have one (Metro Snack) which is a mix up of codes from various other themes (Quacktaculars Realize and CAwesomes Orange Accent) and a few small fixes found here on the forums. Im particularly proud of the vertical menu on that theme - all my own work, CSS based and no java required to run it (AFAIK).

Comments welcome, be kind, its my first forum. We arent updated to MYBB 1.4.10 yet - we are putting the finishing touches to our christmas edition, so the staff section is SUPER busy right now, so I cant take the forum off line.



www.livingsims.nl/forum

Simple and clean, I like it =P

Nice you already have a decent amount of active members.

Were they all from a previous site or they alll newly earned?

I like the magazine idea, good work!

(2009-12-10, 02:35 AM)MyBBhehe Wrote: [ -> ]Nice you already have a decent amount of active members.

Were they all from a previous site or they alll newly earned?

We had an SMF forum on a service where you get ads on your forum and cant add any templates etc (really rubbish). Our magazine is quite popular in the sims players world (we are on 13 issues so far - issue 14 comes out 22nd December), and so we split up the forum and the magazine responsibilities. The site owner and founder does the mag, and I do the forum.

We got our own domain, and I went looking for a NICE forum software that had support, system updates, plug ins and tutorials for newbies and, if possible, free. MyBB fitted that description, so we took our 135 users and moved to a shiny new forum powered by myBB.

Now we have over 300 members, NEARLY one hundred active members and about 35 regular posters.

I think that the sharp new look to the forum (due to myBB) and the portal page are really helping us get registrations. I want to do more with the portal page; its supposed to be like a "teaser ad" for the whole forum, but I have to get better at HTML and CSS first.

Thats cool thats cool

So what exactly is in these magazines?

Its an interior design magazine. But we have no money and don't know any rich or famous people to go take photographs of their houses, and we did not want to just steal photos off the net. We all bought the sims game (to play as well as take pics) and we make houses and decorate in the sims games. In the pictures are items that are either from the game or have been made by modders in the sims community. Then we make pictures and make a web magazine. If the item we show is available on another site (non EA) then we provide a link to it, and you can go download stuff while reading the magazine on line.

Its a bit hard to explain to a non simmer . I will post a link to the mag if its allowed, but the magazine is not ON the forum. The forum is about the magazine, and the game, and interior design, and taking pictures. Our membership is nearly 90% women.....

(2009-12-10, 11:05 PM)leesester Wrote: [ -> ]Our membership is nearly 90% women.....

Now that's crazy. Nice job for sure!

(2009-12-11, 01:38 AM)MyBBhehe Wrote: [ -> ]

(2009-12-10, 11:05 PM)leesester Wrote: [ -> ]Our membership is nearly 90% women.....

Now that's crazy. Nice job for sure!

I've been on forums where the only woman was a banned man pretending to be his sister. How did you manage that!

(2009-12-11, 03:58 AM)Mark.M Wrote: [ -> ]

(2009-12-10, 11:05 PM)leesester Wrote: [ -> ]Our membership is nearly 90% women.....

I've been on forums where the only woman was a banned man pretending to be his sister. How did you manage that!

Its sims - its a real girls game......

What I do think is that to have a successful forum you have to have a hook; something that makes you special - a product in fact. Our product is the magazine. Take a look at the link:

http://www.livingsims.nl/issue12/01page.htm

you just navigate through by clicking on the forward/back arrows.