While this is seemingly simple and stupid, it is important to the webmaster laying down the foundation for the site. Through personal accounts and a little research, the one thing I’ve noticed is that the singular “-forum” version gets far more type-ins than “-forums.” This becomes more apparent over a large spread of time, such as a full 1-year spread.

In fact, in every instance where I own and park both “-forum” and “-forums” versions of a domain name, the singular has greatly exceeded the number of type-ins. It was also true when doing a simple Google Keyword Tool search for “[noun] forum” vs “[noun] forums.”

I suppose this gets tricky when you own only one version of these domains, and someone else already has the other. While a singular and plural can both rank equally for the same term with the right amount of SEO, the moral if this story is all about “type-ins.” If you own the lesser typed in plural forum, you’ll have to accept the fact that your singular-version adversary will get a lot of your type-ins throughout time. Is it better to keep using your plural form, or just find a new domain name altogether? Or, how about a subdomain? Honestly, I’d stick with the plural form and build up on it.

These are the little picky, finicky things that cross your mind before that vital period of time before the site goes up. Worrying about ‘that other guy’ who owns the other version of your domain, the amount of benefit he’ll get from your site in the distant future, and the possibility of that guy doing something stupid like using the domain against you by attempting trademark infringement, is a constant fear of the type-A personality. Overall, getting a site up and running is the first step most people don’t (or won’t!) take – including that other guy. So, get it up, get it running and don’t worry about the specifics.

But, if you have the singular “-forum” domain name for a generic term, you’ve got a nice little advantage.

Here’s a case of big forums that have gone bad after their own popularity has gotten to their head: DigitalPoint is a massive vBulletin-powered forum with an unusual business ethic. They run an infraction system, where members will get a ‘strike’ against their account as any moderator sees fit, for any circumstance. Getting strikes is rather common on this forum, and most of the time, it’s for bullshit reasons. Get enough of them, and you’re perma-banned.

To add insult to injury, DigitalPoint has a system in place where you are not allowed to contest or inquire about why an infraction came about, or, you will get another infraction (since they have a disclaimer saying that you are not to bring up anything regarding infractions you’ve gotten). Sounds rather communistic to me.

By this mentality, you have to take an unlawful infraction and suck it up, regardless if it was justified or not. On top of all of this, there’s absolutely no way to contact the forum owner(s) nor anyone else — which was set up that way on purpose, and you’ll never even know which moderator was the one who gave you the infraction.

My infraction? Posting a reply to a thread that was from 2009, but was ‘bumped’ by someone had got a few additional replies the day before, with mine afterward. I hadn’t even noticed this until I got the infraction notification from DigitalPoint. In the past, I once got a 5-point infraction for spamming on DigitalPoint, when in actuality, I had reported someone else for spamming, but the moderator accidentally gave the points to me. Great way to treat one of your most dedicated forum members. Especially ones who do the moderators’ work FOR them.

There’s a reason why so much exists when you do a simple search for “DigitalPoint sucks.”

With the whole inception of the web 2.0 concept back in the early 2000s, you’d seem to think these kinds of practices were long dead, but it truly amazes you when you see them these days. When running a forum, perhaps it’s best for your moderators to use some kind of business ethic and send users a notice.

In conclusion, here’s the wrong way to run a forum:

• - Appoint moderators who aren’t trained to be moderators, and have them do as they please without your watchful eye
• - Use an infraction system which is abused to high hell by the aforementioned moderators
• - Create a “suggestions and feedback“  section where your users can’t contest unjust infractions without getting more infractions
• - Offer a locked thread about infractions written and updated by abrasive moderators, mocking forum members who get infractions and labeling them as “complainers” and “babies”

…and here’s the proper way:

• - Appoint moderators carefully. Let them know the ground rules. Let them know that visitors are the content providers, therefore, the most important asset of the forum, and that they should be treated with respect (otherwise the entire forum’s reputation gets bashed in blog posts)  ;)
• - Use an infraction system with tact. Hit spammers, but treat regular content providers (especially ones with lots of “green bar”) appropriately.
• - Make it easy for yourself, the ‘business’ owner, to be contacted in cases when your moderators go bad. Otherwise, you’re just seen as a crock and a coward who hides in the background, collecting AdSense revenue.

As for DigitalPoint, I’ve had enough with them – there are many other options out there where users are treated with respect…a simple Google search brings up quite a few. I think I’ll post my daily contributions there from now on. /rant

The instant I saw that email from the hacker, I immediately went into my FTP and simply selected all files within the account and deleted them, then pointed the domain name to my Parked domain parking account. What I saw afterward was pretty amazing.

The traffic was skyrocketing – the domain went from 1 hit per month to over 1,800 hits per day. How can this be? I jumped on a free backlink checker to find out. The result: my stagnant domain name, which had zero backlinks, now has 296 backlinks with anchor text ranging from “cash advance” to “Honda Accord parts” terms.

What the hacker originally did was to create spam threads on the forum, then create a virtual “linkwheel” by pointing links to those spam posts from other forums that he spammed. Obviously, the webmasters of those 200+ forums hadn’t noticed the spam threads he had created.

A good deal of these spam backlinks came from .es and .de forums that he hit. In turn, a vast majority of my traffic was coming from Spain and Germany as as a result. That sheds light on the value of backlinks from geo-targeted domain names and their rankings in those countries.

What I was really interested in was seeing a dip in traffic (I never thought I’d say that…). From its peak, the parked page was getting around 1,800 hits per day. Now, a little over a month later, it’s getting around 480-500 hits per day – all of which are from Spain.

Those worthless backlinks are still pulling in decent traffic; but unfortunately, it’s garbage traffic for topics that have nothing to do with the domain name. Still, it’s pulling in about a dollar a day in clicks – I suppose that’s the only bonus to this whole fiasco. The bad news, of course, is the fact that this is going to be a difficult mess to clean up when I want to actually make something of this domain name someday, and get it to rank for relevant keywords.

Beyond the obvious moral of the story, which is “don’t neglect forum upgrades unless you’re not serious about the forum,” the other one shows the desperate measures that hackers are taking to manipulate SEO. Hacking sites to get linkwheels pointed to backlinks from spammy forum posts? If they’re not automating these attacks, then they’re really wasting a lot of their own time.

On the flipside, a lot of forum admins out there aren’t doing their job!

What this means for you as a current vBulletin customer is that your current license will continue on until it expires, then, you will be able to purchase an owned license without ever having to do so again.

There’s more good news: the dreadful periwinkle & purple home page of vBulletin.com finally looks like a real website from the 21st century. It gives an overview of the two new packages:

• vBulletin 4.0 Forum: Praise the Lord, vBulletin now has SEO capabilities that include search engine friendly URLs (welcome to 2004!), custom meta data for posts, search engine compliant XML sitemaps, anti duplicate content capabilities, a user interface that has been completely redesigned, a management system for media such as photos, and an improved search function.
• vBulletin 4.0 Publishing Suite: It has everything listed above from the classic forum, plus of the new CMS’s bells and whistles; namely with blog and article publishing features, new templating features, a custom widget feature (recent articles, users, friends, posts, blogs, section-specific feeds, polls), along with all of the customization and micro-management admin features that all of us obsessive-compulsive webmasters desire.

All I can say is that I’m really excited about this new release of vBulletin…it has inspired me to revisit some of my old forum-only website ideas. Keep in mind, this is no longer just a forum with some cheap little social networking feature anymore — it’s a full-fledged competitor in the CMS market with the security and features you knew and loved of its predecessor.

If you’re wondering what the new vBulletin looks like – feast your eyes on these freakin’ sweet screenies.

Preliminary pricing for vBulletin’s two 4.0 releases ends on Friday, October 30, 2009. Be sure to jump in to save $50 per license on vBulletin CMS Publishing Suite. I’d chalk this CMS up as a “low-to-mid-priced” one, as its regular price is in the ballpark of $285 when not on sale.