tldr: New site. Hope you enjoy.
@Bennett Prescott and I created Sound Forums with a mission "to provide and preserve a home for audio professionals around the world." We were a new site intended to foster the community that has grown out of many of the other forums. At Sound Forums, we cherish the content created by the community, and intend to keep a searchable archive of it for as long as possible.
We kicked off with FUDforum, running on a small shared hosting service used for our personal websites. I'm pretty sure @Evan Kirkendall named us. Sound Forums outgrew both of these almost immediately, and migrated to a virtual private server and vBulletin. At the time, vBulletin was the best forum platform available. We incorporated to help handle liability and taxes, and moved services over to a top tier hosting provider, Linode. The server backend that @Jeffrey Knorr and @Phil Graham helped put together there scaled incredibly well for our peaks in traffic, including the X32 launch.
vBulletin's development has slowed down significantly over the past two years. 3rd party support by platforms such as Tapatalk is dwindling. The roadmap of vBulletin 5, particularly in regards to responsive design, did not live up to our expectations. With the Sound Forums experience becoming not-so-great™, and the future of vBulletin in question, we decided to transition to a new platform.
The New Sound Forums
To keep a great experience for both forums and news, we've migrated to a mix of Wordpress and Xenforo. We've been working on this in our free time over the past few months, and we finally got to a state where we could flip the switch.
Moderators
@Bennett Prescott and I have taken care of the majority of moderation since we started up, with @Jeff Babcock taking on the DIY Audio area. Neither Bennett or I were working full time at that point, and had plenty of spare time for the forums. Users (mostly @Tim McCulloch) flag posts requiring moderation regularly, and we deal with them as time allows. But this sometimes takes us a few days.
If any users who have been around a while are interested in helping out with moderation on the forums, please reach out to me. It'd be great to have more people removing posts by 'clickthewebsiteformynewpill' and 'buymyrecordingsoftware'.
Advertising
Through early generosity from user donations and manufacturers' advertisements, we'd been able to keep the lights on for the past 6 years. At present, we could sustain operations for the next 5 with our savings in the bank. With the improved mobile experience, we plan to sell ad space again. Please reach out if interested-- our ad performance is the best in the industry.
Ongoing Cleanup
@Bennett Prescott and I created Sound Forums with a mission "to provide and preserve a home for audio professionals around the world." We were a new site intended to foster the community that has grown out of many of the other forums. At Sound Forums, we cherish the content created by the community, and intend to keep a searchable archive of it for as long as possible.
We kicked off with FUDforum, running on a small shared hosting service used for our personal websites. I'm pretty sure @Evan Kirkendall named us. Sound Forums outgrew both of these almost immediately, and migrated to a virtual private server and vBulletin. At the time, vBulletin was the best forum platform available. We incorporated to help handle liability and taxes, and moved services over to a top tier hosting provider, Linode. The server backend that @Jeffrey Knorr and @Phil Graham helped put together there scaled incredibly well for our peaks in traffic, including the X32 launch.
vBulletin's development has slowed down significantly over the past two years. 3rd party support by platforms such as Tapatalk is dwindling. The roadmap of vBulletin 5, particularly in regards to responsive design, did not live up to our expectations. With the Sound Forums experience becoming not-so-great™, and the future of vBulletin in question, we decided to transition to a new platform.
The New Sound Forums
To keep a great experience for both forums and news, we've migrated to a mix of Wordpress and Xenforo. We've been working on this in our free time over the past few months, and we finally got to a state where we could flip the switch.
- All content from the forums has been migrated over to Xenforo 2.
- All news and other articles have moved to Wordpress.
- Blogs have been split between the two.
Moderators
@Bennett Prescott and I have taken care of the majority of moderation since we started up, with @Jeff Babcock taking on the DIY Audio area. Neither Bennett or I were working full time at that point, and had plenty of spare time for the forums. Users (mostly @Tim McCulloch) flag posts requiring moderation regularly, and we deal with them as time allows. But this sometimes takes us a few days.
If any users who have been around a while are interested in helping out with moderation on the forums, please reach out to me. It'd be great to have more people removing posts by 'clickthewebsiteformynewpill' and 'buymyrecordingsoftware'.
Advertising
Through early generosity from user donations and manufacturers' advertisements, we'd been able to keep the lights on for the past 6 years. At present, we could sustain operations for the next 5 with our savings in the bank. With the improved mobile experience, we plan to sell ad space again. Please reach out if interested-- our ad performance is the best in the industry.
Ongoing Cleanup
- We'll be manually cleaning up some of the 'feature' articles, as in-line attachments did not transition well. We don't plan to make any changes to the older news articles though.
- The CMS and Forums are run separately. Whether or not we merge user databases between the two platforms in the future is unclear-- at this point we're focusing on simplicity and ease of management.
- Content from both areas will begin to fill the sidebars as it's all indexed and categorized.
- Speed seems on par with vBulletin, but caches will be regularly flushed over the next few days, impacting performance.
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