Forum update coming, what do you want?

[MTF]

Heads up...

I likely will be getting off the Xenforo platform and moving to a new forum system in the next 60 days. I'm done waiting for Xenforo to put forth a platform that doesn't feel like it is stuck in 2008.

This platform hasn't evolved into the current era, and unfortunately, it has made this place tougher to manage, grow, and facilitate.

The time has come and right now its just a matter of scheduling the move.

Advanced warning: It will be disruptive. It will be risky. And it will be a culture shock around here.

What will be the new platform?

 

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[Guest130641]

Heads up...

I likely will be getting off the Xenforo platform and moving to a new forum system in the next 60 days. I'm done waiting for Xenforo to put forth a platform that doesn't feel like it is stuck in 2008.

This platform hasn't evolved into the current era, and unfortunately, it has made this place tougher to manage, grow, and facilitate.

The time has come and right now its just a matter of scheduling the move.

Advanced warning: It will be disruptive. It will be risky. And it will be a culture shock around here.

When I joined the forum I was like:

Did I just join the wrong forum? Is the forum stuck in 2008?

 

[Vasudev Soni]

Heads up...

I likely will be getting off the Xenforo platform and moving to a new forum system in the next 60 days. I'm done waiting for Xenforo to put forth a platform that doesn't feel like it is stuck in 2008.

This platform hasn't evolved into the current era, and unfortunately, it has made this place tougher to manage, grow, and facilitate.

The time has come and right now its just a matter of scheduling the move.

Advanced warning: It will be disruptive. It will be risky. And it will be a culture shock around here.

I think it will be great. The XenForo forum is really starting to feel old. Time to move on.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

What will be the new platform?

Leaning toward Invision Community or Flarum. Invision has a ton of features which makes content discovery and exposure much easier.

 

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[Bence Ur]

Heads up...

I likely will be getting off the Xenforo platform and moving to a new forum system in the next 60 days. I'm done waiting for Xenforo to put forth a platform that doesn't feel like it is stuck in 2008.

This platform hasn't evolved into the current era, and unfortunately, it has made this place tougher to manage, grow, and facilitate.

The time has come and right now its just a matter of scheduling the move.

Advanced warning: It will be disruptive. It will be risky. And it will be a culture shock around here.

As a user I like this XenForo engine. What are your issues exactly?

Discourse is also a great forum platform. A lot of communities use the Discourse platform nowadays.

But I can't see any issues with XenForo.

Migrating to a new forum engine is a huge pain, are you sure about it? What about SEO? It is always risky to change the existing URL structures, don't forget the existing backlinks pointing to the inner URLs.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

Discourse is also a great forum platform.

That too is a consideration.

What are your issues exactly?

LOL, sorry, I don't have 3 hours to list all the things.

 

[Bence Ur]

That too is a consideration.



LOL, sorry, I don't have 3 hours to list all the things.

Flarum and Discourse look very similar, I know a lot of communities nowadays who use these forum engines, I am also a registered member on other forums who use Flarum or Discourse. As a user I think both are great, maybe Discourse is more advanced.

 

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[Panos Daras]

As many people already indicated the mobile version does not look good. Approximately half of the global web traffic is mobile. In my opinion, this is the one thing that needs to be done. Optimizing for mobile is a strategic move with immediate ROI.
These are the 3 main reasons:

1. Increases User Retention: A great mobile experience keeps users coming back, and increases lifetime value.
2. SEO Boost: Since Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites, this is a must to rank higher.
3. Content Discoverability: A good mobile version makes it easier for readers to find content even with the current not-so-good search engine.
   

 

[Jrjohnny]

Add a thread or guide to the welcome page of the forum.

 

[ImmortalFounder]

Heads up...

I likely will be getting off the Xenforo platform and moving to a new forum system in the next 60 days. I'm done waiting for Xenforo to put forth a platform that doesn't feel like it is stuck in 2008.

This platform hasn't evolved into the current era and is currently mostly dependent on 3rd party developers (many of which are terribly frustrated as I am) and unfortunately, it has made this place tougher to manage, grow, and facilitate.

The time has come and right now its just a matter of scheduling the move.

Advanced warning: It will be disruptive. It will be risky. And it will be a culture shock around here.

@MJ DeMarco I strongly recommend the platform Skool. It is PERFECT for this community. It's intentionally designed for high-quality and organized community discussions, and in my experience so far, has massively succeeded at this.

It works perfectly in any browser and has a great mobile app for both iOS & Android. You may know who Sam Ovens is, he was huge in the info product space, and this is the platform he's developing for it. He's funded it himself, so the only people influencing the platform are his team and actual user feedback gathered in the platform's free community.

Check it out here: Skool: Community platform for creators

If you click the "See It In Action" button it'll show you a 77 second overview of what you can do on the platform, then put you in the Skool platform's free community so you can experience how it works firsthand. No signup required.

Additionally, the SEO design of Skool (especially for public groups) is unbelievably good.
Sam explains how they engineered it for maximum visibility here: Public Groups - SEO Indexing · Skool Community and there's an example of a post in a public group ranking #2 on Google for it's keywords here: Skool SEO · Skool Community

There's also a universal search function built-in that will search the entire community for any keyword or phrase you type in. You'll instantly be able to see every time a specific word or topic has been mentioned across all comment sections and individual posts since the start of the community.

If you decide you like it but don't want to set it up yourself, I'm happy to do it for you. I genuinely believe it would be the best move for this forum. There isn't a single platform alternative I've found that's better than this when it comes to community interaction.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

@MJ DeMarco I strongly recommend the platform Skool. It is PERFECT for this community. It's intentionally designed for high-quality and organized community discussions, and in my experience so far, has massively succeeded at this.

It works perfectly in any browser and has a great mobile app for both iOS & Android. You may know who Sam Ovens is, he was huge in the info product space, and this is the platform he's developing for it. He's funded it himself, so the only people influencing the platform are his team and actual user feedback gathered in the platform's free community.

Check it out here: Skool: Community platform for creators

If you click the "See It In Action" button it'll show you a 77 second overview of what you can do on the platform, then put you in the Skool platform's free community so you can experience how it works firsthand. No signup required.

Additionally, the SEO design of Skool (especially for public groups) is unbelievably good.
Sam explains how they engineered it for maximum visibility here: Public Groups - SEO Indexing · Skool Community and there's an example of a post in a public group ranking #2 on Google for it's keywords here: Skool SEO · Skool Community

There's also a universal search function built-in that will search the entire community for any keyword or phrase you type in. You'll instantly be able to see every time a specific word or topic has been mentioned across all comment sections and individual posts since the start of the community.

If you decide you like it but don't want to set it up yourself, I'm happy to do it for you. I genuinely believe it would be the best move for this forum. There isn't a single platform alternative I've found that's better than this when it comes to community interaction.

I like the format and it looks really promising.

However, Skool doesn't look to be a forum-first platform, but more than an educational platform focused on selling courses. I don't sell courses. They also have no information on converters -- forums generally offer migration and conversion kits. I can't just start a new forum and leave all the posts/users here behind. There are over 1M posts here.

I'm also not inclined to risk a forum with 15+ years of history to a new platform that looks to have only been around for a year or two.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

I like the format and it looks really promising.

However, Skool doesn't look to be a forum-first platform, but more than an educational platform focused on selling courses. I don't sell courses. They also have no information on converters -- forums generally offer migration and conversion kits. I can't just start a new forum and leave all the posts/users here behind. There are over 1M posts here.

I'm also not inclined to risk a forum with 15+ years of history to a new platform that looks to have only been around for a year or two.

Skool is the brainchild of Sam Ovens, big time guru who was making $50M/yr selling courses back in 2015-16. He also had a partnership with Tai Lopez, and there are some videos of the two encouraging the kids to start their own consulting business and print cash from their pijamas. Sam Ovens is the “child” of Dane Maxwell’s Foundation program. Dane, I believe, was active on the forum for a shortwhile, many years back in the early 2010s.

 

[Robdavis]

Leaning toward Invision Community or Flarum. Invision has a ton of features which makes content discovery and exposure much easier.

@MJ DeMarco , have you considered Mighty Networks? They are at https://www.mightynetworks.com/

I was a member of a community based on a Mighty Network for a few months and whilst I left, (due to the content) the platform was IMO super easy to use and seems to be highly flexible.

I'm guessing that you have already considered them and ruled them out, but just in case you haven't.

For clarity, I am not associated with Mighty Networks in any way.

 

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[Fox]

@MJ DeMarco , have you considered Mighty Networks? They are at https://www.mightynetworks.com/

I was a member of a community based on a Mighty Network for a few months and whilst I left, (due to the content) the platform was IMO super easy to use and seems to be highly flexible.

I'm guessing that you have already considered them and ruled them out, but just in case you haven't.

For clarity, I am not associated with Mighty Networks in any way.

Don't use them - I switched to them before and there is a huge loading lag time on posts.

You don't notice at first but after a few days it becomes painful to use.

 

[Andy Black]

Don't use them - I switched to them before and there is a huge loading lag time on posts.

You don't notice at first but after a few days it becomes painful to use.

I had a play with Mighty Networks a few years ago. It seemed more interested in looking good than making it easy to find and engage in conversations. That was just my cursory observation, and a few years ago.

I don't particularly like Skool or Circle either. I don't like nested comments for starters (Circle had them I believe).

 

[MJ DeMarco]

have you considered Mighty Networks?

No, part of my consideration is there needs to be migration or conversion software. There are 15 years of posts here.

 

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[ImmortalFounder]

I like the format and it looks really promising.

However, Skool doesn't look to be a forum-first platform, but more than an educational platform focused on selling courses. I don't sell courses. They also have no information on converters -- forums generally offer migration and conversion kits. I can't just start a new forum and leave all the posts/users here behind. There are over 1M posts here.

I'm also not inclined to risk a forum with 15+ years of history to a new platform that looks to have only been around for a year or two.

You're right, Skool is designed with course-creators & membership-communities in mind. However, I'm in groups that don't have courses at all and instead will use the Classroom area to link to specific external resources (the way you currently link to your books & your other sites, and you can link to your YouTube content) along with posts from the community that are of notable quality. Other groups will disable the classroom area entirely in favor of strictly using the community feed for discussions.

Skool has been in public beta since 2019, so they're in year four of public access now. Here's where Sam first announced it: Welcome to Skool Beta — Start here · Skool Community

There's also a whole section you can go through of users explaining their use cases for Skool here: How Blake Uses Skool - Skool Secrets · Skool Community

As far as migration goes, I'll ask them if they offer anything like that. The Skool team replies to direct messages nearly instantly during their workweek, so I'll report back with what they say. I understand not wanting to leave behind 1m+ posts, though I also don't think moving to another forum-looking-platform will be the "modern upgrade" this forum needs.

Is there a way to create an archive of this forum's posts that can be browsed separately? I don't know enough about forum management to offer an alternative to needing to migrate posts.

 

[MitchC]

You're right, Skool is designed with course-creators & membership-communities in mind. However, I'm in groups that don't have courses at all and instead will use the Classroom area to link to specific external resources (the way you currently link to your books & your other sites, or you can link to your YouTube channel) along with posts from the community that are of notable quality. Other groups will disable the classroom area entirely in favor of strictly using the community feed for discussions.

Skool has been in public beta since 2019, so they're in year four of public access now. Here's where Sam first announced it: Welcome to Skool Beta — Start here · Skool Community

There's also a whole section you can go through of users explaining their use cases for Skool here: How Blake Uses Skool - Skool Secrets · Skool Community

As far as migration goes, I'll ask them if they offer anything like that. The Skool team replies to direct messages nearly instantly during their workweek, so I'll report back with what they say. I understand not wanting to leave behind 1m+ posts, though I also don't think moving to another forum-looking-platform will be the "modern upgrade" this forum needs.

Is there a way to create an archive of this forum's posts that can be browsed separately? I don't know enough about forum management to offer an alternative to needing to migrate posts.

Skool is great for what it is but it absolutely is not a forum software, even if it were possible to migrate somehow the user experience would be horrible

Skools community feature is basically a Facebook feed, or a subreddit

People are on here because they want a forum, not reddit or Facebook group

 

[ImmortalFounder]

Skool is great for what it is but it absolutely is not a forum software, even if it were possible to migrate somehow the user experience would be horrible

Skools community feature is basically a Facebook feed, or a subreddit

People are on here because they want a forum, not reddit or Facebook group

Respectfully, I disagree. I think people are here for the content and discussions first, not for the forum style layout. Personally, I find this forum layout a pain in the a$$ from a user perspective. It’s inefficient to use on mobile and desktop both. I’d much rather be in a simple & familiar-feeling Facebook-style UI community than on a different forum platform that poorly mimics what Reddit already does better.

The benefits Skool holds over FB & Reddit are the post organization features and the total lack of distractions. There’s no noise, no ads, and it’s geared to reward users for quality discussions. Skool could absolutely be used to make the Fastlane Forum a high quality & easily accessible place for users to visit both on mobile and desktop.

 

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[MJ DeMarco]

Respectfully, I disagree. I think people are here for the content and discussions first, not for the forum style layout. Personally, I find this forum layout a pain in the a$$ from a user perspective. It’s inefficient to use on mobile and desktop both. I’d much rather be in a simple & familiar-feeling Facebook-style UI community than on a different forum platform that poorly mimics what Reddit already does better.

The benefits Skool holds over FB & Reddit are the post organization features and the total lack of distractions. There’s no noise, no ads, and it’s geared to reward users for quality discussions. Skool could absolutely be used to make the Fastlane Forum a high quality & easily accessible place for users to visit both on mobile and desktop.

You work for the company? It sounds like you do.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

@ImmortalFounder and everyone else, this is exactly how hard selling looks like. Pretend to resonate with the concerns of who you’re talking with so long as they agree to do what you ask them to. Perfect example

 

[ImmortalFounder]

You work for the company? It sounds like you do.

No lol. I just love the platform and have been a user of it since 2020. This is what a satisfied customer looks like, I’ve been wishing this forum was on Skool instead since I joined it.

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

No lol. I just love the platform and have been a user of it since 2020. This is what a satisfied customer looks like, I’ve been wishing this forum was on Skool instead since I joined it.

Yes, that’s why you’ve been so inactive on the forum, right?

(Though, tbh, it doesn’t surprise me Sam‘s folks would be hard closing people to switch to his platform. Damn, those high ticket closers at consulting used to DRAG people’s hand on the dotted line… get your card out, right now, wtf! )

 

[ImmortalFounder]

Yes, that’s why you’ve been so inactive on the forum, right?

Yes, I only joined this forum with an account earlier this year. I’m not new to MJ’s content, I’ve read all his books at least 3 times and have gifted people copies of his books. Not sure why you’re coming at me like I’m “doing something wrong” by suggesting an alternative platform that I’ve been a satisfied user of for years in a thread about changing platforms.

 

[Black_Dragon43]

Yes, I only joined this forum with an account earlier this year. I’m not new to MJ’s content, I’ve read all his books at least 3 times and have gifted people copies of his books. Not sure why you’re coming at me like I’m “doing something wrong” by suggesting an alternative platform that I’ve been a satisfied user of for years in a thread about changing platforms.

Yah bro, I’m not sure either. You’re clearly an expert who understands the needs of the forum better than the founder. I hope MJ has his card nearby and signs up for a year of Skool right now!

 

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[ImmortalFounder]

Yah bro, I’m not sure either. You’re clearly an expert who understands the needs of the forum better than the founder. I hope MJ has his card nearby and signs up for a year of Skool right now!

I never claimed to know the needs of the forum better than the founder, I never said anything about buying from me, didn’t post any affiliate links, didn’t ask MJ to pay me for anything. I suggested a platform that I’ve enjoyed as a user and think could be a good fit for this forum. You seem to think you have me pegged as a “closer for Sam” or trying to do something shady. All I did was offer my opinion and a suggestion for where to migrate. MJ is free to ignore or take my input as he pleases, I do not care. Don’t know how that’s a crime or why you’re taking offense to my input.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

but I would like to add a few more links to my signature.

Done, I doubled it from 5 to 10.

 

[ProcessPro]

Done, I doubled it from 5 to 10.

I've wondered what it would be like to have a ChatGPT AI tool trained on all the posts of all members with over a certain User Power %. So for the people always asking for a mentor, that AI might be something of a mentor.

 

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[Xeon]

1) Remove the User Power %

2) Show the country names of every member next to the posts (probably below Date Joined or under the avatar)

 

[YouCanDoThis]

Been in a couple of forums that use Discourse and I’ve been perfectly content with that. Great mobile support + search functionality, which are my biggest two annoyances.

I looked at Flarum myself back when it was in beta and we needed a forum of our own. Looks to mimic Discourse mostly.

Another addition that might benefit the forum, though it has nothing to do with the forum tech: better explainers. For example, the post ratio. When you join, nowhere (in my recollection) does it mention *why* it’s there, what the perks of a high percentage is, what one needs to do to gain speed points, etc. I assume it’s to stimulate high-quality posting, which I’m a fan off, but the system could be clearer. Getting speed points feels like a draw of the lottery sometimes.

Speedway is another thing. I thought that was a feature of the past. Only learned in this thread it isn’t, yet I’m still not sure what exactly it’s for and where it is?