Anil Pandey

Hi

I am planning to put up a forum. The realization hit me when I attended a seminar on the subject yesterday and found so many people lining up to get the information. I have managed to have verbal assurance of joinings from dozens of people. The market exists, and the potential is huge. To give an example, 20 people bought a $1300 product on the spot (ultimately the paid seminar was just a promo for selling the product).

The site would be more of a membership site with some forum type features thrown in, where the members have the privilege to ask questions, send PM and even live chat with online members. Members should be able to start threads. Initially the membership would be free but would like to have a paid option later on (when the site develops some reputation and traffic).

I am not able to decide what should be the platform for that and how to go about it. What scripts to use as there seem to be so many membership scripts available, paid and free.

I could have used any free script and tested it but would prefer some advice from knowledgeable people.

Any advice would be greatly helpful.

Thanks in advance.

Anil Pandey

Anil Pandey

Will a blog let the members do all that? Will they be able to start a thread, reply on a thread, send PMs, chat live, work on two different levels (free and paid) etc.

Janet Sawyer

Hi Anil,

Take a look at Easymemberpro, it's a reasonable price, you can have free members and paid members at a later date.
You can also link it to a forum that only members can access.

Janet

ScottFox

Hi Anil,

In this thread I posted a spreadsheet reviewing dozens of membership site providers last year. You can still download the PDF for free here:
Free membership site vendor comparison spreadsheet

I think you're looking for more than a blog. What you really want I expect is more like your own social network. This encourages the interaction between members much better than simple blog commenting will.

The easiest option for that is to start a Facebook Group. That is quick and free. Unfortunately, you lose most all of your own branding and layout flexibility, however.

You can install your own scripts, etc. but that's too techie for me. I like hosted services that make setup easy and quick (and make upgrades and tech support someone else's responsibility instead of mine).

SubHub, Social Go, and Ning are the best examples I've found of this so far. Ning is the most powerful and growing the most quickly, but it does not yet offer integrated membership billing like the other 2 do.

I hope that's helpful.

Best,
Scott Fox

p.s. If you'd like to see my own private social network in action, visit ClickMillionaires.com and sign up for the free trial.

-------------------------------------------
Scott Fox
Host of Click Millionaires
Author, e-Riches 2.0: Next Generation Online Marketing Strategies

Anil Pandey

Hi

Thanks for the reply. I was very eagerly waiting to hear from you.

Actually I do not want to use any one of the existing services. One reason is that I do not want to be become one of the "Also Ran"

I do have some experience of a membership site though. I had ran a social networking site for a particular area of my country (it was utkalbandhu.com) but somehow did not pursue it further and did not even renew the domain after had to relocate to my current location. (It seems that somebody is selling that domain. The minimum bid is $999)

What I am looking for a is a site which has all the features of a membership site. But I also need a forum integrated into that as I feel that people would need to be given information and advice on a subject, but they also would need to be able to put forth their doubts and questions by starting a thread and letting others reply to that. On top of that, they would also be able to take instant advice from online members (feature available only to paid members though). In fact, instead of one on one chat, there should be some type of a general chat room where not only a member can chat on one-to-one basis, but also where everybody could chat with each other. Easymemberpro suggested by Janetplace and rapidactionprofits seem to be able to provide that. I had contacted the customer care of easymemberpro but they said that though they do have the free and paid membership option, they did not have the PM and chat option. On my suggestion that they customise it with a chat software, they refused stating that theirs is not a open software and they will not be able to provide support for that. Additionally, any upgrades would automatically overwrite all the existing addons and modifications.

The membership site I ran in the past was based on Dolphin 6 script, which had almost all these options available. They also had an option where you could upload and/or embed audios or videos from any site like youtube, veoh etc. Somehow the forum part did not look professional at all. Also want to let people ability to send sms to each other (another paid option)

May be I am expecting too much and it may not be possible. But I do not want to treat this project like a one night stand but do it full-fledged and whole heartedly, whatever it takes. I feel though, that all these features are possible in one way or other. In fact there was a wso here itself which almost offered most of the features.

Have downloaded your pdf and have to agree it is quite a resource indeed. Thanks. But do not know if anybody would be able to fulfill that. Since do not know the amount of bandwidth requirements, would prefer to go with some unlimited bandwidth host. It seems hostgator people do offer such an option.

Maybe I need to do some more research and will have to garner whatever advice and help I can garner.

Thanks

Anil Pandey

Gimme4Free

I personally use amember pro on a few sites and I also created a smaller script that works too. I accept payments mainly via paypal so you can redirect the user to a thankyou page with variables in the URL, then enter the payment into your database and activate the user for XXX days. This is of course if you have programming skills, if not then it shouldn't be a very big job for a coder, maybe $10-$15 on a freelancer site.

Michael Mayo

WOW Anil,
How did I miss this thread???
Long time no see guy!

How the heck have you been?
I got worried when you stop visiting the WDIC.

I though something bad had happened. Thank God you're OK!

Send me a PM here and I'll reinstate your membership to the WarriorDojo.
There we can discuss your options for a membership site script.

Really glad to see you back!
Talk with you soon.
Michael

Anil Pandey

Michael

I was never more happy to see a reply. Got busy doing this and that!

Thanks. I am more excited now that, yes, something would finally come out of this crazy idea of mine. Not that membership sites are not there, but the type of features I intend to provide are not much. If it has one forum, then it does not have chat; if it has chat feature, it does not have chat rooms, sms etc. The list is endless!

Since past Sunday, as soon as I attended the seminar By Alok Jain, and got the idea that it was worthless and I could have added quite a few things in there and that people there does exist a market for such a forum, I have been going nuts deciding on the right platform.

Sending a PM right away. Kindly do the needful.

Thanks for coming in here.

Anil Pandey

FrankJohnson

Anil:

I would recommend Expression Engine. It can do most, if not all, of what you described in your original post.

Membership system - yes
Members starting threads and asking questions - yes, through the included forum
Members sending PM - yes, through the included forums
Live chat - not out of the box, but basically any script can be added
Paid membership - Expression Engine allows for members to be upgraded to groups with more privileges based on purchases made through their Simple Commerce module (PayPal only). If you need something more sophisticated, amember integrates with Expression Engine (although I've never used the integration - I've used both Expression Engine and amember, just never together) to give you more payment options

I'm new in the forums here, so I don't yet have enough posts to be able to post links, but if you go to Google, you can search on "expression engine" - their site will be the first listing.

Hope that helps.

Frank

jamespitt

I've put some nice sites together using Drupal - the membership/sign-up stuff works 'out of the box' pretty well & you can tie it into paypal to buy upgrades. It's a bit fiddly to get working, but it's not technically hard. Let me know if you want more info.