Good News

The new FanaticSpace Forums are up and running now.

Our old forum was beginning to act strangely, so I had to shut it down and do some troubleshooting. After examining the options I decided to scrap it and move to a different board platform.

Better News

We’ve switched to forum software that more tightly integrates with the rest of the site.

Before the switch, the forums were a separate login, now there’s just one. Sign in anywhere on the site and you’re good to go.

I’ll be working on making the integration as seamless as possible, but that’s no reason to keep you waiting. The forums are open and ready for you to start posting your threads.

If there’s anything you would like added to the new forum, or the site in general, just let me know.

I know some people have had trouble registering for the forums. I’ve been trying to find the problem, and I think I’ve might have found it.

E-Mail Problem

This problem affected users who tried to register for the forum, but never received an e-mail to activate the account. I made some changes to the forum and it should now be working..

I apologize to all the people that this happened to.

Update: I went through the inactive users and had new verification e-mails sent out. Only 2 of them bounced. The e-mails must have had a typo, or they don’t exist. Either way, they couldn’t activate the accounts so I deleted ‘em.

It’s been a busy week for me. I’ve got a lot back-end tweaks done and I’m working on even more. Once I get things done I might release a couple of ‘em as plug-ins. We’ll see how useful they are to everyone here at FanaticSpace first. I got some comment formatting done too. Finally found a way to check and see if the commentator is a crew member here without having to hard code anything. That’s easier on me because that means I can add to the Crew without changing code.

Speaking of adding to the FanaticSpace Crew, there are two new authors. That means more cool stuff to look forward to.

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Fan Community

I’ve been thinking a lot about fan communities lately. I am trying to build FanaticSpace into thriving fan community after all. To do that I need to know… what is a fan community?

Let’s take a look at a few different ways fans can come together to form a community online.

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You may have noticed a change in the way that FanaticSpace is structured. I finally got tired of trying to build a decent layout and bought one that I could tweak. I decided to use the magazine version of the Revolution theme for a couple of reasons.

My priorities were multiple layout options and site wide consistency.  I even toyed with the idea of switching to a CMS like Drupal that could handle blogs, forums and any kind of page I might need. Another advantage of a CMS would be integration of everything into one account. In the end I decided against the all in one solution. While it does handle everything, it doesn’t handle it in the way that I want.

I decided that I would use the tools I’m familiar with. Now that I have a theme that I like, I can get back to work on content and community building.