Do any of you have a "support forum" for your app?

xyloFUN

Hi gang,
i just finished an app (awaiting app-roval or is it Appleroval) and need a support forum for the users ...
I am not looking for a WordPress solution but rather a stand alone one.

Do any of you have a forum on your site and if yes, which one did you choose?

Thanks

Photics

What's wrong with a WordPress solution...
http://photics.com/forums

My forum is not very busy. Heh... perhaps there are no support issues.

xyloFUN

Interesting ... i use the Mingle forum on one of my web pages too but this time, I need something different as long is it is secure "enough".
Basically, I want to use my front page http://ernstrenner.com and make a link to a forum which deals with a specific app I've made for mostly German users.
This is a new experiment for me and therefore I want to keep it separate but now that I think of it, maybe that is not such a good ida because it creates twice the work which is not a smart solution ... as you know

NexusGameStudio

I recently installed Mingle as my forum solution, works very well (coming from a guy who has used many forum solutions before). Integrates well with my site.

http://www.nexusgamestudio.com/forums

For a standalone forum, without a server, try invisionfree forums, if you do have a server and are willing to go through a lot of effort, try forums like phpBB and vBulletin.

Photics

NexusGameStudio said:
if you do have a server and are willing to go through a lot of effort, try forums like phpBB and vBulletin.

Also another alternative... PunBB. It's not a lot frills, just a simple forum.

xyloFUN said:
it creates twice the work which is not a smart solution

Yeah, I like that I streamlined my website into a single database. It's less work.

As an example, vBulletin is great forum software (not so great CMS/Blog, but the forum part is solid). The problem is that vBulletin has a lot of updates. That wouldn't be such a problem, as WordPress has updates too, but there seems to be more testing involved with VBulletin... did my plugins break, what did this do to my templates, does my website still work, did my database get corrupted?

I thought I was done with the whole forum / CMS problem, but my copy of vBulletin just went bad on me. I had to reinstall. So, I setup my website with WordPress. With Artisteer making it easy to make my site look pretty, I'm fairly happy with the WordPress / Mingle combo.

xyloFUN

Thanks Nexus and thanks Photics!

@ Photocs

I went with your suggestion and just installed it! You saved me a LOT of time and I consider you now, at least in one area, smarter than Google!

vBulletin is impressive, looks exactly the way i like it to look AND, perhaps best of all, has in iPhone app to browse and post to the forum which, considering that I put this up for those who use a specific app of mine which I want to keep away from the others, is great!

Thanks a lot

Photics

xyloFUN said:
I went with your suggestion and just installed it!

Which suggestion? I made no suggestions. I simply posted my experiences with various web software.

Did you go with Mingle or vBulletin?

xyloFUN said:
You saved me a LOT of time and I consider you now, at least in one area, smarter than Google!

That's not much of a compliment. I just found out today that a Duck is well on it's way to challenging Google...

http://duckduckgo.com

xyloFUN

well, .... maybe "suggestion" was not a good word to use.

I have never heard of vBulleting until you mentioned it so i checked it out, liked what I saw and now it's ready to go! Fast, simple, painless! It will do

http://ernstrenner.com/forum

p.s. THAT duck will never fly

Photics

xyloFUN said:
p.s. THAT duck will never fly

http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/duckduckgo.com

It looks like it's taking off to me. The site hides your search terms from websites. That's a huge difference from Google/Bing.

xyloFUN

interesting, I did not know that!

While this is a great feature and surely will find some users, I think the bulk of folks are too lazy just like IE / Firefox that is sad but true.
I look at my logs and see that most of them still use IE 6 AND, they come form the US. I don't get it but hey .. it's a free world out there!
I suppose porn and warez seekers have a new homepage now? ;-)

Photics

xyloFUN said:
I suppose porn and warez seekers have a new homepage now? ;-)

It does seem that the major reason to hide search terms is for deviant behavior. I noticed that the majority of users to this website are 18-24 males. Porn is highly suspect. HA HA!

Hunnenkoenig

I used to have a forum for all our apps.
Nothing happened there except spam.

I deleted the forum. It's not worth it.

Eveb Flight Control forum was visited by a few hundred... or rather few ten people back then, when they were on top.

xyloFUN

Hunnenkoenig said:
I used to have a forum for all our apps.
Nothing happened there except spam.

I deleted the forum. It's not worth it.

To tell you the truth, I am not crazy about a forum ether but the problem is that I made a new instrument that has the potential to do well. It comes in a free and non-free version for $2.99
With the help of a forum and youtube videos, I will try to generate a little bit of a "following" around the app. If that fails, than I can delete it.
As you say, spam is a huge problem so I will see in a few days how it unfolds.
Apple will probably not approve the apps before the end of the month and there is a slight chance that they might reject it because this time, I was pushing GS by loading as many sounds as I could before slowing things down.

I hope that future updates can be done some other way than GS because I still would like to include more sounds and features.