Meetro Abandoned for Lefora, A Hosted Forum Solution
Mark Hendrickson
24 comments »
Meetro is finally coming out of the closet with the hosted forum solution we anticipated last October, and it’s pretty much what we expected it to be: a white label platform like Ning except without all that social networking humbo jumbo, just good old fashioned discussion threads.
The product, once codenamed “Makaha”, is now officially known as Lefora. The team behind Meetro has effectively abandoned Meetro for Lefora, dropping all development and support for “the world’s first location-aware IM client and real-time social network.”
Much of Lefora’s feature set should be familiar to anyone who used forums in the 90s (they haven’t changed much since then). But it also supports capabilities not found with many modern-day forum solutions, such as the ability to easily embed YouTube videos, files, and images. Lefora uses Amazon S3 storage to host files uploaded to its forums, currently with no storage caps.
Lefora also surfaces the hottest topics and most recent activity on a special homepage, in addition to providing the standard structural overview of a forum. Membership to one Lefora forum can be easily extended to membership of another, since all of them access the same user base.
The look and feel of Lefora forums can be customized extensively with CSS modifications, pre-made themes, and color adjustments. Categories and widgets, such as those for polls and hot topics, can be managed via drag-n-drop. The company’s working on an API that will allow developers to add their own widgets to the gallery, although you can already add your own custom, HTML-based widgets.
Moderation is an important element of forum management and Lefora has decided to build their own spam detection engine from the ground up. The engine is similar to Akismet and that used by Gmail in that it leverages data from many properties to detect and eliminate spam more effectively.
When we first wrote about Meetro’s plans, many commenters were skeptical that the web needed a Blogger for forums. CEO Paul Bragiel insists that forums are still very popular, with the top 2,000 forums boasting over 200m registered users.
He believes Lefora will not only make it easier to create forums, but it will “light them up” as well since the platform has been designed with SEO optimization in mind. Threads are given URLs that reveal their topic, as with blogging platforms like WordPress, instead of ones that look suspicious to search engines. If Lefora takes off, we might expect to see even more search results point to discussion threads.
In its current form, Lefora is a pretty solid product but not without its quirks, bugs, and inconveniences. The design editor could use some UI improvements and there’s no simple way to reset your password as a user. Also, Lefora has yet to feature some premium capabilities that more serious customers will demand, such as domain masking. But all in all, the service is off to a good start.
Join a test TechCrunch forum here.
Open source software like phpBB are more popular for forums. Yes Lefora may have many new features. But still many webmasters prefer to download and host the forum software on their own server. So they should open source the platform, much like Pligg is doing for Digg.
Great. 200M users… WOW..
Seems like a good start. The creation was quite simple and solid. Look forward to the continued improvements.
Mark - How long did it take you to set up the test TC forum?
Also, anyone have suggestions for the easiest software to integrate into an existing site (i.e. local hosting)? I see phpBB recommended above, is that the clear market leader?
Smart move - often thought about starting a small forum site for special interests but couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of hosting and maintenance. The other players I’ve seen in this space seem to overdo the additional features when all you really want is some simple forums. Don’t think much of the ‘lefora’ name tho.
I got to say it’s pretty darn neat… that test site you set-up really shows this product very well… I was considering phpBB but now I may have to reconsider for a few projects I got on the table.
Jon
http://dreamclue.com … get the message!
@Shafqat Vbulletin is the market leader in terms of forums, although it requires a licensing fee so a lot of the smaller forums (which I assume is lefora’s target market) use phpbb
Good to see more new stuff on the boardscape!
Well, I guess this is good news. Me being one person working on something similar is a little disheartening - there’s only so much one person can do. It’s just good to see that others are working on the same space, thinking there’s something out there worth chasing.
Competition is good, but at this point there’s not much from my end to contribute to the competition. I’m interested in what good stuff Lefora will bring to the table :). Congrats to their team for a pretty awesome product.
Meh…
Vanilla forums, are just as much (if not more) flexible for themes and CSS, is Open Source, and can be hosted on your own server. Plus, there are hundreds of open-source add-ons that have been created by other users for Vanilla.
Let’s see…another horribly branded service with virtually no market demand and no revenue model. These are not businesses so why are you covering them? And where did that 200mm figure come from? The only people I know who frequent forums are programmers. Are you telling me that there are 200 million programmers out there?
Frankly, this kind of thing dilutes the value of Techcrunch- the fact that you report this stuff without questioning the legitimacy of their business model.
Martin - I completely disagree. They’re a startup getting their way up to speed on what their product can do to bring in revenue. At least that’s what I would suspect is the gameplan at this point. It IS an untapped market because I’ve run into numerous people who would *like* their own branded/themed forum but couldn’t give a crap about php, mysql, linux, etc. If it works for blogger, blogspot, wordpress - why not forums?
Also - you underestimate the niche communities that live everywhere that comprise, what I would imagine to be, the majority of that 200M people. Just because you don’t see or know about them doesn’t mean they’re not there.
Martin - you are wildly off base on forum popularity. I have seen estimates as high as 350m worldwide users, covering every demographic and interest area you can think of. We mine these types of communities for our clients and the activity is simply amazing. For example, in just road biking alone the aggregate community user (not viewer) base is about 300,000 with about 20-25 million posts. We are mining the teen demographic for a client and the boards there (everything from Nexopia to ellegirl to teenvogue) have about 2 million users and we have just started looking. If the only people you know who frequent forums are programmers you need to get out more :-).
Indeed Aaron is correct..
For example, we track today many millions of new posts a day coming from message boards where the vast majority is not programming related.
In fact, you can find forums for just about anything.. EVEN technophobia
Just take an example forums like disboards.com with over 150,000 members, all talking about vacations and Disney. or forums about cars, reptiles, handbags and even one that caters to people with keen interest in high/big buildings demolition.
And there are indeed, to our estimates over 350 million forum members.
I bet soon enough you will find such “strange” forums on Lefora, once non-TechCrunch crowd settles in..
I thought Meetro was a great idea, but they added so many features and such a weird interface it became too much of a chore to figure out.
If the same people are involved….
There are a number of outfits that host forums for free, though one might have to put up with ads. Some demand a post every week or so to feed the hungry ads or the forum is deleted, e.g., http://www.forumup.org/ . Good for practicing how to manage a phpBB forum.
I think this is fucking fantastic! I can’t wait to get started.
I have to agree with several others that Martin Edic is way wrong. The internet world of forums is enormously broad, popular, and useful. I have dozens of bookmarks for active forums in my hobbies - computer technology, computer gaming, mercedes benz w124 class cars, parrots and other pet birds, woodworking, etc. etc. They use a wide variety of forum software, of varying sophistication and quality. I definitely think there is a market for a Blogger- or Wordpress- level entity in the internet forum space.
the CEO just spammed me asking me to digg his site..
what kind of shady practice is he running.
I wouldn’t touch him or his software with a 6ft pole
bunch of idiots , I clicked on “SIGN ME UP” and got http://www.meetro.com/register - 404 Page not found
LOL, guess they couldnt find a server in my area to log me onto
Its good to know when its over and abandon a project, I had to make the same difficult decision 6 month ago myself.
I dont know much about the forums market so I am going to keep my mouth shut.
I know one of the guys at Meetro and he is a good man so I wish him the best.
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Just signed up to their forum. Looks very very basic. Lacking many important features. I can’t even disable replies on “sticky” posts!
We’ll see how it goes.