Who deserves to inherit Polish Forums?

Why did the ATP fail on a "modern" software? It had everything you wanted, so what was the problem?
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....hmmm......we wondered that ourselves....we really hoped to offer a better place for all PFers....but nobody seemed to care.... but it had avatars and shiny colors..
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Yeah...more modern.....less insulting....maybe you have a point? it was a general thought.. the point is, we could add many more features but features don't run the site..
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Quite, and avatars are just either pictures or signs really. They add nothing except a symbol, and of course photo hosting costs.
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It had nothing to do with software, which wasn't all that modern anyway (a free SMF board).


New European regulations regarding internet boards hosted in the EU (RODO and stuff) which would require more time and hassle than either BB or I had (and could potentially expose us to legal action if we failed to comply). Plus, I was unnerved by an irresponsible member posting illegal stuff, which resulted in me having to reply to letters from regional prosecutor's office. In retrospect, I should have hosted the board with an American company - you enjoy much more freedom of speech and are under fewer laws and regulations. Oh, well... it's all a distant past anyway.

One way or another - if you don't try a better software, you'll never know whether it would attract more members or not. So why not try? You may refer to $40 vs $250 a month below.
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...but we learned to appreciate a good Admins work, didn't we! :)
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Sure. The guy is a mainstay. :)
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From xenforo pricing page: xenforo.com/purchase/. I don't know how they calculate page views, but PF had more than 1M page views last month (these are not visitors, but page views). So it would require the Business package at $250 a month.
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WOW!
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Standard package would do just fine for a start, and it's $1080 a year when paid annually or $100 on a monthly basis. They would block the site after there are more page views than allowed in the package.

Or even better - you can host the site on your own and then it's only a $195 one-off licence payment. So you buy the software for 200 bucks, find decent hosting for about a $100 a month and you have a site with modern forum software even with the current level of user contributions (which, mind you, will most likely be higher when there's more users... sorry for stating the obvious).
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I don't mind posting stats, here are the stats from Jan 2025.

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  PF Jan-2025
  

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So, the second option - with purchasing the software licence for $195 and hosting the site on your own - seems much better. So who would be doing upgrades, programming, etc.? They want $50 an hour for that and the license needs to be renewed.
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That's what I call traffic! 😎

I severely underestimated that.....sometimes it felt really quiet, with only a few old horses posting and bitching.....
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You can download free bug fixes and additional features from community forums, if needed (constant upgrades are not necessary anyway, if you have a stable version of the software). From what people say it's much easier to run than SMF (and it's very easy!). The thing basically runs itself. $195 a year for the license is not that much, and with the annual licence renewal you also get the latest version of the software.


... and 100,000 people observing it and deciding not to join the slug fest. ;)
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That we all could scratch together....there would even be some coffey money for the Admin left.....I guess....

If it remains constant....and said Admin hasn't to work more, that is!
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Or... if we really want to cut the cost, then let's try phpBB or SMF - it has all the bells and whistles too, huge modability and it's all free. Then we only have to worry about half-decent hosting (possible even with current members' contribution level).
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.....maybe the best way is we wait for the hosting change and what it brings first?
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Each automatic upgrade to the newest version refers to the main software only. That means, no addons (no avatars, signatures, ratings etc) are included because they are installed / managed separately and are not considered to be the part of the core software. Each main software upgrade can and often does break addons which need to be separately updated (if updates are available) or custimized. In result, to run such software trouble-free would be best not to include any addons. It would make no difference between PF and Xenforo then.
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It never happened to our SMF board, so I doubt it's the case with XenForo or vBulletin.

As I said, even the free phpBB and SMF with all the modability potential (very easy to operate - I could help with that) and modern features might potentially attract more members. I will repeat the question - why not try? If you stick with what you always had, you will get what you always had (again, sorry for stating the obvious). To try = to spend time and resources. I'd assume it would take at least a full week of study to learn the software from administrator's point of view and to migrate the site would take a professional service. I just know the site on phpBB or SMF would be slower, and if we add other features it would be considerably slower. So it would mean at least one week (40 hours) of study for me, and $35 an hour for a professional service to move everything and customize. The cost would eat all the donations we received so far.
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Wow! That's a lot of page visits considering there's very few posters...

They can't all be spooks working for the Polish government, wanting to see what we're saying!

I do know that some journalists in national media outside Poland read things here when they're writing articles regarding Poland and as I've said, the trash talk (most of it coming from the same individual) certainly puts people off. A few people known to me who live in Warsaw that sometimes read things in the forum but have never posted have said exactly that.
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Who deserves to inherit Polish Forums?
I think you should leave this forum to your children, jon.
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No thanks, not mine to bequeath.
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Bot traffic. Bots and web crawlers (like Bing's and Google's) produce the most page views on boards with few regular users. Those crawlers are pretty relentless, hitting pages to keep search results fresh. About 65% of web traffic on slightly sleepy boards like PF are bots. Still, 1 million page views a month means that there's enough real traffic and people visiting the forum but not joining (very likely for the reasons you mention but also because it feels outdated).


Definitely.


Not necessarily. There are phpBB and SMF boards, with hundreds of active members, running very smoothly.
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....does that mean the bots are raising that much costs? If Admin has to pay accordingly to the traffic that's a **** of a business model!
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... at ATP bots created about 80% of the traffic. It cost us nothing because we paid fixed rate for a medium quality shared hosting. It would indeed be ridiculous if a site owner had to pay more because crawlers generated 700,000 page views out of 1 million. Perhaps companies like Xenforo take it into account and only charge for real views? I don't know.
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A decade ago, stats included both both and non-bot traffic. Today, they can differentiate between viewed (human) vs non-viewed (bot) traffic [attached]. Bot traffic doesn't really add to the hosting cost since the pages are minimized before loading and bots don't even load full pages.

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  viewedtraffic.jpg
  

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That's good news. So perhaps the $1080 a year Xenforo package would be enough if it's the price for 1 million human page views a month? Last month there were 1.44M human page views a month, so it's unlikely to be enough.
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0_0

Wow! The disparity between viewers and posters in online communities is usually significant, but in case of PF it's gargantuan! According to the so called "90-9-1" rule (90% lurkers, 9% occasional contributors, and 1% active creators), with such human traffic, PolishForums should have 14,000 (yes, fourteen thousand!) regular contributors monthly. Something doesn't add up here. *scratches head* There are online newspapers that have 10M visitors a month and a comment section below each article with 50-100 comments, so it's about right. There's a difference between a page view and a visitor, so it's important not to confuse a unique visitor with a page view.
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....that would bring us back to the theory of PF being highly addictive! 😉

Even non-posters can't help themselves and clicking and reading and scrolling some more....every day :)
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Genau! :)
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