5 Easy Ways to Make Your Forum Thive With Activity

Every forum admin has been there one day or another. Things are going pretty good on your forum, but after a little while, you notice your board has somehow stopped gaining speed. How to make your forum more active?

Like for many things, many small details can make a huge difference. The following suggestions are pretty easy to put together and achieve great results in less than a month.

So, what are the easiest actions you can take to bring your forum up to the next level? Let's see!

Chitika Review - Pay Per Click Ads

I tested Chitika, a pay per click (PPC) ads service to help publishers monetize their traffic. I displayed their ads a forum message board and 2 blogs for approximately a week, with very disappointing results. Here's my quick review of Chitika.

$0.07 for 5 clicks? Are you kidding!?

You read it well. What they give you per click is ridiculous. The highest paid click I managed to get was $0.03. I've read similar feedback on quite a few blogs and forums analyzing various ads networks. It would seem that their PPC is very, very low, especially if you're used to Adsense's $0.50 to $3.00 per click. Even with a very high click-through rate, which I had not, it would take you a huge number of clicks to earn anything of interest. 

AdSense Account Disabled for Invalid Activity

Thank you Google for closing my Adsense account for reasons that are out of my control. I've been working with Adsense for more than 5 years now, publishing ads on 4 different websites. Nothing weird ever happened until last month.

On a certain day last month, I got about 150 clicks in less than an hour that were obviously invalid. Someone out there clicking repeatedly on my ads? Probably... I reported that weird activity right away, to make sure they don't close my account. What else was I supposed to do?

Well, a month later, here I am. They disabled my account and rejected my appeal request. Nice.

At least they sent me my last payout the day before they closed my account...

From FlatPress to Blogger

A few days ago, as I was customizing my blog again, I realized that something was wrong. All that time I've been using FlatPress, I kept modifying, fine-tuning and working again and again on my blog's design and features without being able to make it feel right. I was investing more time and efforts in the container than in the content. That's not right. It was time to let go and move on.

I happened to test Google's Blogger, a product I didn't use in years. I was surprised to see how it improved over the last 5 years. I found what I was looking for. Then, I went through all my posts one by one and copied them to Blogger. Didn't feel like messing around with a potential way to batch import my entries. Not for only 17 blog posts. 15 minutes later, all my content was migrated.

A part of me is sad to move away from a product I care about. FlatPress, although not powerful and widely used as WordPress or Blogger, is a great product. It's developer, NoWhereMan is a great guy. I decided to go with it several years ago because it's easy to customize and I wanted to learn a few things along the way, which I did. Did I overgrow it? I don't think so. I'm just tired of my blog being in constant development. I still want to develop themes for FlatPress though, it's an amazing platform to learn and experiment, while bringing forward the product's development. But I'm not going to use it for my personal blog. For now.

For the first time in years, I'm satisfied with how my blog looks, feels and works. Hope it'll last!

MTU Size for PPTPD VPN Sessions

Users are getting a black screen when connecting to their Windows workstation using RDP through a PPTP VPN? After looking at all possible causes, I found out the issue had to do with the VPN PPP sessions’ MTU size. Here’s how to fix the MTU size of Ubuntu’s PPTPD sessions so that everyone can get their work done.

Edit /etc/ppp/ip-up and add the following line at the end:

/sbin/ifconfig $PPP_IFACE mtu 1500

You’ll see that new PPP connections now have a MTU of 1500 when using ifconfig.

It would appear that an MTU size of 1396 for PPP sessions will sometimes cause issues when using Windows 7’s RDP through the VPN, no matter what the display options are. Fixing the MTU to 1500 as explained above fixed the black screen glitch right away. The problem was on the server after all.