vForums Blog

As some of you may have noticed yesterday evening, and others may have noticed friday evening, the support forum has been offline while I’ve been trying to implement some changes.

Trying is the key word in that sentence though. Over the past week my ISP has proven itself to be very unreliable. It seems I can’t stay connected to the Internet for any extended period of time (my record this week has been an hour) without then losing the connection for anywhere from 5 minutes to 2 hours (I gave up trying to post this message last night after an hour and a half wait).

With those kinds of circumstances it would be foolhardy to attempt any kind of upgrade on user forums. As was the case yesterday evening, I could lose connection whilst halfway through uploading a key file. For this reason I’m going to hold off on a few updates until I’m confident that they will go without any issues and when I’m sure I’ll be online to help with any issues which do arise.

For anyone who is interested, these updates will mainly be backend changes. I’ve been attempting to give all admin pages a more standardized layout. I’ve also been looking into a few search engine optimization issues, ones often related to forums and am trying to find the best possible solutions to these. I’ll keep you updated on when we plan to implement them.

Also, while doing all this, we’ve been looking at the main website and intend to give it a complete revamp. And then there’s still one big feature in development but it still has some security issues to deal with before we can show you a working demo. Watch this space!

First off, I’d just like to inform everyone that most chatroom updates will be posted here in the blog.

Before I talk about recent additions, I’ll give you a little history on the Chatroom…

If you’ve been around for a while, you’ll remember that the chatroom was first released to vForums Support back in April. However, development of the chatroom goes way back to December 2007 if you include the planning stages.

For the first few months the chatroom was simply something I did as a side project, but as it neared completion (at least to a state where it could be implemented), I began to focus more and more time on it. Finally it was at a stage where it could be integrated with the Support forum and tested out, so Ross took on the implementation; fixing up aspects of the coding in order to make it work with the system, as well as making some other changes.

After integration, however, it became a side project for me again; something I would work on when I got the chance. A few months past, and people began asking for a release date, so I began working on it bit by bit again, trying to get it closer to full completion.

Then recently, somehow the main file for the chatroom became replaced with a really old version of it, causing a lot of Ross and I’s work to be lost. Luckily though, Ross had a recent backup which he uploaded, bringing it back to a properly functioning state.

Since then, I have began working on the chatroom more often, and have made some recent changes.

The most noticeable addition would most likely be the option to have a sound play for new messages. It is still a bit buggy at the moment, but shouldn’t be too hard to fix.

Most of the other changes were things with the backend of the system, in an attempt to make the coding more efficient, so would not be physically noticeable to end users.

As the project nears the stage where it can be released to all forums, I was hoping to get input from all of you out there as to what you would like to see implemented into the chatroom. If you have any suggestions, simply comment below and I’ll be sure to review them all.

I’ve just processed the monthly stats which I do at the end of every month to see how we are performing. I was pleasantly pleased to see that the number of new signups for July has set a new record. In fact, July has had more new signups than May and June combined!

Lets hope that we continue to grow at this rate

After a pretty short discussion we (which refers to the other vForums Support Mods & I) agreed that a blog could be a good addition to the website. We’re hoping it’ll enable us to give users a better insight into what we do, both on vforums and elsewhere. Hopefully you’ll be seeing some posts from the others from time to time, as lets face it, who wants to read me ramble on all the time

Thinking of which, maybe I should introduce myself & my history for those who are new to vForums. I first got seriously interested in web development when I was 16, I was writing a lot of Javascript mods for existing remotely hosted software at the time. Unfortunately (or I suppose this should be “fortunately”) this didn’t fulfil my hunger for knowledge, and I started to learn PHP with MySql. I started to make a few pieces of software with this new knowledge to help expand my experience, this ranged from hit-counters to image randomizers and eventually to a guest book.

12 months down the line I had finished my A-Levels and I was looking for a career to move into, the career I felt best suited me would be one in web development. Unfortunately most web development companies don’t like taking on people who haven’t already got experience and a strong portfolio, so I l knew what I had to do.

Since it’s original creation my guest book script had undergone some major improvements and core changes, it was now a message board. I spent a lot of free time over the following months improving the software. I have a feeling that having that software listed on my portfolio was a big influence in securing me the web developer job which I’ve been doing since September 2007. It was because of the positive comments I received from my colleagues that I decided that vForums could be a worthwhile business, it was then in November 2007 that virtualforums.co.uk received its first sign-up.

Since it’s primitive start the software has undergone many changes and has grown massively, larger than I would have thought possible 12 months ago. Lets just hope vForums continues to grow and thrive! I think that’s all to say at the moment, apart from I’m sorry for anyone who got bored in all that, I have a terrible tendency to get carried away. If anyone has any other questions about the company or me then you can post a comment, although I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to answer all questions