It's been several months since I took over the reigns at iNET Interactive, the owner/publisher of dBForums. I want to take this opportunity to check in with you, and to tell you about some things we are planning for the future.

When I started, we had some work to do to get the community returned to health. dBForums was not getting the attention it deserved from iNET, and moderation had fallen off. Thanks to the dedication of and the input from a group of committed community members, we got things back on the right track. We implemented the tools the moderators needed to manage the community, and we brought in some help from other iNET communities. Again, I think we are back on track and headed in the right direction.

There is still work to do, though. dBForums is a tremendous resource for DBAs and developers. They find us (usually through a google search) when they are having a problem, and they usually leave with the answer... either by finding a thread on a similar issue or by soliciting help from the community. Therein lies the challenge... they find the answer, and then they leave. We need to find ways to grow and build the core community of people who hang at at dbForums to learn, help and have fun. I'm open to your suggestions/ideas/feedback on how we can build and grow the core membership.

I also want you to know that we've heard the complaints regarding page load times and search performance. dBforums is such a large repository of data that we are pushing the limits of vBulletin and MySQL. We have been working with the makers of vBulletin, and we are deploying a new server cluster per their recommendations. This should be done in the next couple of weeks. We are hopeful that you will see an improvement.

I also want to let you know that we are planning to roll out something called Contextual Advertising. Contextual advertisers look for key words in the forum text and highlights them. If the user rolls over the highlight, they will see a relevant text ad. Similar programs have been implemented at places like Tom's Hardware, Techspot, Hardware Zone and others. At this point, we are planning to implement this for GUESTS ONLY. The ads would be suppressed for Members. We view this as a win/win for iNET and the community. It helps generate revenue that we can re-invest in dBforums, and it provides an incentives for guests sitting on the sideline to become a member and get involved.

We at iNET are committed to making dBforums the best database forum on the Net. As always, I am open to your feedback and suggestions. Here's to continued progress!!

Cheers,

Troy

Hi Troy,
Thats a great idea.The revenue generation should be done keeping all the current useful functionalities intact.
Best wishes from me.Good Luck.