Introducing TechCrunch Forums

January 4th, 2007 at 10:26 pm

Great work Michael! Looking forward to read and write about other web 2.0 companies and entrepreneurs.

January 4th, 2007 at 10:27 pm

You paid thousands of dollars for forum software!!!! And it doesn’t even look good, or like TechCrunch. If you must have paid for your software, why not choose something a little less pricey - like vBulletin for $160 - it also powers thousands of forums like sitepoint.com and it seems like out of the big forums on big-boards.com, only 4 use Jive. You could have even tried an open source solution like the companion to WordPress, bbPress. This has kinda turned me off TechCrunch.

January 4th, 2007 at 10:31 pm

I still like TechCrunch. It’s just that $3000+ for a forum is a bit excessive. And it doesn’t really look like techcrunch

January 4th, 2007 at 10:46 pm

I agree, the amount of money paid is a little crazy. I would have gone with something like MyBB, but hey, that’s just me…

January 4th, 2007 at 10:55 pm

Great idea for the forum. The comments are as interesting as the posts on your blog, hopefully the forum will be an extension of that.

I agree about the software though, vbulletin would probably be better. Just sayin..

January 4th, 2007 at 10:57 pm

Excellent! Will be interesting to see if this move inspires more bloggers to add forums and what the knock on effect will be in the boardscape.

January 4th, 2007 at 11:14 pm

For some reason, I found it highly amusing that the forums were “quietly” launched … what would a “loud” launch been like, I wonder?

I’m digging the boards; good job, Michael. Let’s hope the trolls don’t take it over

January 4th, 2007 at 11:24 pm

agreed… nice move Michael. Should generate a ton more page views too.

January 4th, 2007 at 11:43 pm

great move mike, i think i had read somewhere like few months ago that techcrunch was going to have forums, and today i said “wow”:)
but the forum itself is not looking great, for example in each reply to the post the date, time and title is shown and it is in the same font, size and color with the reply itself, one reading the reply gets lost in this useless info. most of replies are given in the same day and it puts the same date in every reply.
would be better if you give a try to IPB or vbulletin.

@permanent hater, does vbulletins “no round corners” give u a reason to call them “crap forum software”? how many round corners do googles home page have? i mean the google.com… go count, and then post a reply.

January 4th, 2007 at 11:46 pm

Huh? No OpenID? Stone age…

January 4th, 2007 at 11:58 pm

I registered about an hour ago and I still haven’t received my confirmation email. I checked my spam box and it’s not there either. Strange.

January 5th, 2007 at 12:22 am

It will be great to have the forum and Wordpress blog membership integrated

January 5th, 2007 at 12:30 am

Great move guys. I’m addicted already. Can’t wait to see how fast the forums grow. Definitely recommend some stickies with some basic guidelines for posters. Keep up the great work!

–brian

January 5th, 2007 at 12:52 am

So no one thinks 3k gets you better forum software? Techcrunch and network can afford to pay a lot more for marginally better software.

January 5th, 2007 at 1:35 am

VBulletin is one of the worst forum packages I have ever come across. PHPBB is the second worst package. I don’t know why anyone would recommend those bloated and badly coded pieces of software.

I’ve never used Jive before but from a quick flick round the forums it appears to run quite quickly. I’d have preferred to have seen the use of Vanilla but I’m pleased that it’s not either of the afore mentioned packages.

January 5th, 2007 at 2:06 am

With all these features getting added to techcrunch will you not rather call it a website now rather than a blog?

January 5th, 2007 at 3:23 am

great great.. love the idea.. more conversations, yey!!

January 5th, 2007 at 3:37 am

Great Idea!

But VB or phpbb should have been better

January 5th, 2007 at 5:02 am

This is a great move on behalf of TechCrunch. I look forward to seeing how it’ll evolve over time.

Cheers.

January 5th, 2007 at 5:56 am

Hmm..still waiting for the confirmation mail.. (3 hours..)

hope i’ll get it soon

January 5th, 2007 at 6:07 am

Well I have noticed main media picks up stories from web 2.0 working around them facelifting them and making them unrecognisable. So we achieved democratisation of Expression, shall we soon get credit for the same.

http://www.tekno-world.blogspot.com

January 5th, 2007 at 7:22 am

The email confirmation doesn’t work for my email too

January 5th, 2007 at 7:48 am

Great..I like TC but fely some of the backing and forthing would be most suitable in a forum format.

January 5th, 2007 at 7:51 am

It never occur to anyone here that perhaps Jive Software could be paying Techcrunch to use their forum software? Correct me if I’m wrong.

January 5th, 2007 at 8:04 am

That’s a smashing move!
It’s always good to keep progressing on the journey towards success, whether it is blogs or forums or anything else.Once you know the formula for the success then you can apply that for multiple things and profit from it as well as increase your popularity.
ATB !!!

January 5th, 2007 at 8:11 am

It is just like a bunch of techies to argue about what software to use. This does not matter! It is about the communication!! If I had the budget I would spring for the best bb software as well. I am sure Mike has done his homework on this, come on. A lot of bb software is very susceptible to spam and I suspect this was a concern that is worth investing in.

January 5th, 2007 at 8:32 am

Just because you haven’t heard of Jive doesn’t make it bad. They target enterprises more than public sites, but there are some big installs, like Sun’s Java forums.

I was surprised to see the use of Jive as well, just because it is expensive and Java based, and I didn’t know MT allowed Java apps.

Kudos to you Michael for going against the grain.

BTW, I think the very next thing you should add to the forums is a link back to the blog! Making the ‘TechCrunch’ text in the ‘TechCrunch Forums’ header a link would be perfect.

January 5th, 2007 at 8:38 am

Brooke You guys actually paid for a forum? There are many open-source solutions available or you could have created your own in a few days using RoR/PhP with MySQL and Apache… with very little previous experience.

Sure he could spend days hacking on it and then a couple hours a week trying to patch it and update … but only if his time was worth $0. Maybe he would get the satisfication out of looking at the PhpBB code, but I didn’t think he was into S&M.

January 5th, 2007 at 8:50 am

props michael.

don’t listen to the haters. looking forward to seeing you pimp out your new board.

here is a thread where people throw out their ideas for the new forum
http://forums.techcrunch.com/f.....p;tstart=0

January 5th, 2007 at 8:57 am

“grand prize” where’s the sp check?

January 5th, 2007 at 9:03 am

great to see a forum up! although i would have preferred to have seen http://getvanilla.com in this case.

January 5th, 2007 at 9:13 am

Still no confirmation email after about 10 hours.

January 5th, 2007 at 9:38 am

So Mike,

Does this compete with Edgio? I thought we were going beyond the walled garden…

Alex

January 5th, 2007 at 9:47 am

congrats… forums are a great idea, and likely valuable regardless of platform.

that said, i do wonder whether phpBB or vBulletin might be better long-term choices, simply due to product maturity / size of audience. (in the past, i’ve chosen vBulletin & Snitz Forums for other projects, and i’ve seen a number of others choose phpBB). hopefully you’re getting some specific custom features and/or support from Jive for the money you’re paying.

still, i’d note that direct initial cost isn’t nearly as important as ongoing support cost, however i’d guess that platforms with larger audience & more history probably have greater stability / lower support cost, as well as bigger feature set.

in any case, congrats on launching another cool feature for the TC community… and keep up the great work!

happy new year,

- dave mcclure
http://500hats.typepad.com

January 5th, 2007 at 10:13 am

Forums are indeed a good idea (I’m a big fan of forums). But, I agree with many of the commenters: from a user perspective, Jive really isn’t great software. vBulletin would handle the load of this site fine, and is much more user friendly and prettier. And cheaper. Probably better from the backend too, though I haven’t seen Jive, it doesn’t get much easier than vB from a moderation standpoint. And if you really felt the need to pay for enterprise level software (unnecessary, but whatever) then you’d have been better off choosing Lithium. They power the forums for Sony, Nintendo, Adult Swim, etc. Much more traditional and easy to use forum software.

January 5th, 2007 at 11:45 am

Nick Dynice - lol…. indeed.

Nick Dynice
It is just like a bunch of techies to argue about what software to use

January 5th, 2007 at 12:20 pm

Grrrrr, sure I don’t have the time to read anything else ! LOL

Well done.

January 5th, 2007 at 1:02 pm

No confirmation yet for me either. Seven hours later and counting….

If I were you Mike, I would chew on someone’s a$$ over at Jive. For as much money as you paid, they should have installed it, tested, and been all over the release.

January 5th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

what a nightmare those forums are going to be if you don’t put in moderators and a clear set of categories…all i expect to see are “me too” pitches…could you please have some readers volunteer to moderate a set of categories?

January 5th, 2007 at 1:54 pm

Mike, like others i to don’t like the software you choose to run, but I’m just curious to why you choose this software and thought that spending thousands of dollars on something far less functional for you and the community was a better choose than going with vbulletin, or vanilla?

Thanks,
- Aaron

January 5th, 2007 at 2:37 pm

Great Job Guys - I would have gone with vBulletin myself just because its easier tro use and more people are familiar with it, but that really doesnt matter.

However, you guys really need to add more than just one section to talk about everything

January 5th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

Dan Grossman,

That’s exactly what i was looking for.

Thanks!

January 5th, 2007 at 3:16 pm

Never got a confirmation email? Registered under the name Vidiac

January 5th, 2007 at 4:18 pm

This is very cool, but am I the only person having trouble trying to access the forums right now? Sorry if I missed a message saying it was going to be down or anything.

January 5th, 2007 at 4:24 pm

Dollars to doughnuts that Jive is paying Michael to use it’s forum software… not the other way around.

January 5th, 2007 at 7:08 pm

Hi Michael, at the top of your forums it says “CrunchForums”. I actually was about to register crunchforums.com some months ago when it was still available, but I didn’t register it because that would be kind of wrong.

So do you own the domain currently or are you still trying to get it?

January 5th, 2007 at 7:54 pm

12 hours later and still no confirmation email… I think ill pass on this forum.

January 5th, 2007 at 8:55 pm

Hey, it’s me again. I tried out the software. How the forum topics are ordered it a little unusual. There doesn’t appear to be an BBCode legend to tell us how to create links (is it the standard [url=http://example.com]example[/url]?).

But I do understand why it is so expensive. It is written in Java!!

January 5th, 2007 at 10:47 pm

“Unlike vBulletin or Vanilla, they’re built to scale extremely well, are coded extremely well, and are backed by excellent support and knowledgeable programmers.”

This is not a fair statement to make. vBulletin has great support and I’ve never seen problems with performance even on the biggest of forums. Plus, suggesting that it’s not coded well is a very suggestive comment to make about it. Vanilla, code wise, was built for performance. Although the support isn’t there, suggestion their code isn’t done well is literally an insult to the open source developers…

January 6th, 2007 at 11:02 am

- - -
“Brooke You guys actually paid for a forum? There are many open-source solutions available or you could have created your own in a few days using RoR/PhP with MySQL and Apache… with very little previous experience.

Sure he could spend days hacking on it and then a couple hours a week trying to patch it and update … but only if his time was worth $0. Maybe he would get the satisfication out of looking at the PhpBB code, but I didn’t think he was into S&M.”
- - -
Every blogger who opens up comments is a masochist - LOL

January 6th, 2007 at 2:16 pm

I’d love to participate in this forum, but like many above me, don’t have a verification email yet. I wonder if I should try and reregister? Any word on whether this was a temporary glitch?

January 15th, 2007 at 8:48 pm

I just came across some news clippings on Mashable.com about how Chinese and German clones of Facebook have been acquired by other companies for some handsome price. Then I tried to visit these sites and found them to be a clone in the real sense of the word. Try going to http://www.studivz.net/ and see how closely it resembles with Facebook in even the graphical representation.

iListOnline - a new Symbiosis for Students, Alumni and Teachers :

I recently came across this new University centric educational networking/content management site (http://www.ilistonline.com) which is trying to remove the boundaries that other existing University networks such as Facebook have created where users are some how tied to their University network and can not much see what is happening outside their University. I liked this concept of University community networking without these artificial boundaries put in place by Facebook where the free speech and information sharing is unnecessarily being restricted just because Mark Zuckerberg seems to like this idea. iListOnline.com clearly is trying to remove this barrier and is trying to let all of its users communicate/share/collaborate/network with other University communities without any restriction across user roles (Students/Alumni/Teachers) and across more than 700 Universities.

In Facebook all users irrespective of whether they are Students, Alumni or Teachers are clubbed in to one single group. This has created numerous problems for its users especially for Students. I have read articles in the past about how employers screen their applicants based on information they gather from Facebook about their prospective candidates and if some objectionable behavior is found they reject such applicants. Also there have been numerous reports about Parents and Teachers invading the privacy of Students. So on networks such as Facebook, Students can never feel safe about the information they post. iListOnline.com is trying to resolve this issue to some extent by separating users based on their current relationship (Student, Alumni and Teachers) with the University. In iListOnline.com all users have been classified in 3 different user roles (Students, Alumni and Teachers) based on user’s current relationship with the University. Users can register as a Student, Alumni or a Teacher and after registration can add multiple University affiliations in different roles if they gave valid University email addresses. Each role has different registration requirements. Basic idea here is to give Students, Alumni and Teachers there own spaces to collaborate and network and yet give users the power to network across user roles and Universities if they wish. I liked this concept of separation yet giving the users the ability to cross their role and University boundaries.

Classifieds and Groupify :

I found that iListOnline.com has been meticulously designed for the University community in mind. They have created two main parts on this site which are iListOnline Classifieds and iListOnline Groupify with extensive Help topics in their Help section which describes all the features quite thoroughly.

A. iListOnline Classifieds :

They have created a complete separate area for classifieds where anyone can post classifieds related to buy/sell, find internships/jobs, ask questions, personals, parent of university students can network with other parents, alumni can find other alumni in their town, prospective students can ask questions and many other categories suited to the University community needs. Making this classifieds section open to public makes sense as there are many people who are not directly part of the University community but are connected with it in some way, for example local businesses and residents from the same town where the University is located, prospective students applying to this University, parents of students currently studying at this University etc. Hence by making classifieds section ‘open to all’, iListOnline gives an opportunity for such people to communicate with the current University community in a safe and secure way. In classifieds section user emails are completely hidden (even in any anonymous form) to combat spam. Classifieds section is per University basis and hence it gives the much needed granularity to this section. Newslinks category in iListOnline classifieds also shows latest news from the University (if the University supports RSS feeds), or from international, national news sites using RSS feeds. Currently classifieds section is available in Universities from over 17 countries.

Having this classifieds section completely separate makes a lot of sense as then user doesn’t have to post these classifieds inside his/her Groups. In Facebook I have noticed that most of the content posted in any Group is 90% of the time is some classifieds ad about some one wanting to sell their tickets or trying to find a roommate which clearly defeats the purpose of forming Groups. On iListOnline because of having a separate section just devoted to classifieds the content posted to Groups would be lot cleaner and would be more related to the Group theme.

B. iListOnline Groupify :

This section requires creating user accounts using valid University email addresses (for Alumni based on valid University alumni email addresses).

Registration :

The registration process is quite simple. Students and Teachers can register using their university (ending with ‘edu’) email addresses where as registering in Teacher class needs administrator’s approval. For Alumni account any email address with ‘alum’ word after @ qualifies them to register for iListOnline.com. Because of the irregularities in Alumni email addresses it seems like they have created this separate rule for Alumni accounts. It would have been nicer if they could have given links to the University pages where Alumni can request for alumni email forwarding services.

In addition Students can upgrade their accounts to Alumni once they graduate and then can become part of the Alumni Group.

iListOnline.com offers many useful features such as Groups, Blogs, Collaborative Documents (Books), Discussion Forums, Polls, Photos, Bookmarks, Messaging etc thereby creating a safe and secure online space where Students, Alumni and Teachers from over 700 universities can share, collaborate and network with each other even outside their own role and University boundaries.

Group based content access control :

Instead of tying users to the University boundaries, in iListOnline.com access control to user content is fully in users hands. The entire access control mechanism in this site is based on the Groups that the user is subscribed to. This way the user is in full charge of controlling access to his/her posted content and hence can control who can see which posts.

Any user who registers becomes a member of 3 Groups by default -

As an example if the user registers on iListOnline as a Student at MIT then he will become part of

1. Students Group - Here he/she can connect/share/collaborate/network with all Students from all over 700 Universities. So if the user wants to express something for all Students from all Universities then this is the group to give access to the posted content.

2. MIT University Group - Here he/she can connect/share/collaborate/network with all Students and Alumni and Teachers from MIT. If the user wants to express something only within his/her University boundaries then this is the group to give access to the posted content.

3. Students of MIT Group - Here he/she can connect/share/collaborate/network with all Students from MIT. If the user wants to express something only for Students at MIT then this is the group to give access to the posted content.

Registration in Alumni or Teacher roles work in the similar fashion. Users can as well be in multiple roles at different or same Universities and they will become part of more such default groups. Users can also add multiple University affiliations if they have valid University email addresses. For example if the user registers as Student at MIT and then adds university affiliation for Alumni at Stanford then he will become part of following default groups -

Students Group, Alumni Group, MIT University Group, Stanford University Group, Students at MIT Group, Alumni at Stanford Group and so on.

Features :

Some of the features offered by iListOnline.com are as follows -

1. Groups -

Users can create their own public/private/moderated groups. While creating such groups users can set the visibility settings such that it can be visible to Students and/or Alumni and/or Teachers from all Universities or from specific (at most 5) Universities of their choice. This way they can control which users can become members of this group.

For example if the user wants to create a Group called “RedSox Vs Yankees” he/she can set the visibility setting such that it is only visible to Students and Alumni and Teachers from MIT, HARVARD, BOSTON UNIVERSITY, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY etc. Alternatively the user can create a moderated group for all Students, Alumni and Teachers from all Universities and approve subscription requests only if the user belongs to any of the Universities based in Boston or New York.

Teachers can create their private secure course groups where they can invite students from their classes to join and can post assignments, course schedule, share files etc. Students in these groups can then ask questions, doubts, discuss with other classmates in their courses, create collaborative project reports (books) and lot more.

2. Collaborative Documents (books) -

This is a very nice feature that iListOnline is offering its users. Using this feature Students can create collaborative documents about their course work. Teachers can write collaborative research papers (inside private groups so no one else can see them). Or creative writers can create open groups and let everybody chip in writing a creative story.

3. Blogs -

Users can maintain personal private blog as well as can give access permissions based on his/her Groups to control who can see his/her blog. Currently iListOnline blogs do not support RSS feeds.

4. Polls -

Users can create opinion polls, add comments on polls etc.

5. Forums -

Users can create discussion topics in Forums.

6. Pages -

Users can create static pages etc, Main purpose of pages is anything any user wants to write which is not a blog can be a Page. For example Teachers can create course Assignments etc as Pages.

7. Albums -

The nice thing about the implementation of albums in iListOnline is that you can control access to individual photos based your groups. This is a very useful and handy feature.

As an example: If the user takes pictures of a on campus party, you want all the pictures of this party in one album. You can upload all pictures to this album and then can set audience for each picture independently. This way you can select which pictures to be shown to which groups and still have them organized in a single album.

8. Network -

Here users can create network of other members that they are either friends with or the members whose posts they like to read. It is not exactly meant as creating a friends list instead think of it as a book-marking a user. iListOnline provides a very easy way to access posts made by members in a user’s network so that they can easily keep track of what people in their network are talking about.

9. Bookmarks -

iListOnline also provides a way to bookmark internal content on this site as well as users can enter external links and save them. This way users can access their bookmarks from anywhere. Also they can see bookmarks saved by other users (only if the user allows sharing of bookmarks). If the user likes blog posted by another user he can easily bookmark it and if he allows sharing of bookmarks then will become available on his/her pr