Finite

Imagine if everything was finite. Tangible or not, imagine it all came from a finite reserve.
Not just the air you breathe or the water you drink, but also the feelings you always had.
Your happiness or sorrow or ambition or hope or even despair; they were all finite feelings that you could one day run out of and be unable to feel them anymore.
Imagine also that you know the amount available in that reserve that all humans share, so if you smile you be consuming the one chance of someone else ever knowing how it is like to smile.
The more knowledge you learn or experience you gain would mean depriving someone else of that and keeping him in the dark.
The more health and sports you practice, the more someone else is in pain fighting some a fierce disease.
Even the distance you always displaced your vehicle through would be constantly cutting out of the total available distance the whole world can commute, resulting in another person being unable to move again.
The feeling of sorrow for losing someone dear could just be unavailable as it was repeatedly consumed when someone else was sad or angry about something trivial that was unworthy.
The pride or glory that was based on false victories and mistaken heroes would eventually mean real heroes are never to be glorified or appreciated as their world had already ran out of pride.
Creativity, innovation and new ideas, imagine they were all finite, what happens when people use the available ideas reserve in evil deeds; fighting each other, trapping others, betraying one another, what share then would prosperity and peace feed and foster from.
Friendship and love, if it all was for the sake of benefit and advantage, how would a soul find its soul mate if the cosmic soul bonds were all torn.
Prayers if all were for selfish needs and desires, what fate would await light-hearted, devoted and kind angels.
What would remain of the Fairness reserve if it was distributed unevenly across bribers, rulers and occupiers; the answer is nothing finite or infinite will remain.

Web community rallies to free Egyptian blogger

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/2006-05-16-egyptian-blogger_x.htm

By Ursula Lindsey, The Christian Science Monitor
CAIRO — “Today it hit me, I am really in prison. I’m not sure how I feel,” began the May 10 entry on Alaa Abdel-Fatah’s popular Egyptian blog manalaa.net.
A pro-reform activist and prolific online critic of the Egyptian government, Mr. Abdel-Fatah’s account from his Cairo jail cell appeared — it was smuggled out — three days after he was arrested by Egyptian security forces.

He is just one among hundreds of demonstrators detained over the past few weeks while protesting the treatment of two judges who claimed recent Egyptian parliamentary elections were rigged. But his detention has rights groups and fellow activists concerned that Egypt is extending its violent crackdown on demonstrations on the street to free expression on the Internet, which is being used more and more throughout the Middle East as a tool to organize and a forum for open political discussion.

In August 2005, the Monitor profiled Abdel-Fatah in an article on Egypt’s growing cyber-activist community. His Web log — which was created with his wife, Manal Hassan — serves as a meeting point for hundreds of Internet-savvy and politically active young Egyptians. In November 2005, the blog won a top award from Reporters Without Borders for promoting freedom of expression.

In March, Abdel-Fatah helped organize an overnight sit-in in Cairo. Alerted by websites, e-mails, text messages, and newspaper ads, about 100 demonstrators spent the night singing songs and waving anti-Mubarak signs at passing traffic.

“In the last year we won back the right to protest,” said Abdel-Fatah at the time, referring to the frequent demonstrations that various prodemocracy groups had been holding in the streets of Cairo since January 2005.

But Tuesday Egypt’s Interior Ministry said that any unauthorized street protests would be considered as breaking the law. Since April 24, more than 300 demonstrators, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the secular opposition, have been detained. They were all arrested while trying to hold demonstrations in support of the two Egyptian judges. Abdel-Fatah was detained May 7 while standing with a small group of protesters outside a Cairo courthouse where the judges were arguing their case.

Abdel-Fatah and other protesters — many of whom were beaten by plain-clothes officers and security forces during their arrests — have been charged with crimes such as insulting the president, blocking traffic, rioting and destroying public property, disseminating subversive materials, and inciting the public to demonstrate. All those arrested are being held in detention pending investigation.

Protests are illegal under Egypt’s emergency law, reinstated last month, which bans any gathering of more than five people. But most protests have been tolerated over the past year.

“The government before was talking about reform, they wanted to show they were serious, and allow different groups to express themselves,” says Hafez Abu Saeeda, head of the Egyptian Organization of Human Rights.

But now, he says, Western governments see the Egyptian regime as a necessary ally in the region, and are more willing to overlook its lack of reform, although both the U.S. and the European Union have been critical of the recent arrests. On May 11 the U.S. State Department said, “We are deeply concerned by reports of Egyptian Government arrests and repression of demonstrators.”

According to others, such as Hassan Nafae, head of the political science department at Cairo University, the crackdown on demonstrators is a symptom of political malaise. “President Mubarak is getting old, I am not quite sure he’s in real command of the whole situation,” says Mr. Nafae.

“There is almost an absence of overall policy, what to do with political reform and so on. [The government’s] decisions reflect a situation of fear rather than self-confidence.”

Meanwhile, Egyptian officials deny they are curtailing freedoms. At a recent press conference, Gamal Mubarak, heir apparent of President Hosni Mubarak, dismissed the attacks and detentions of demonstrators as “specific incidents” and “skirmishes.” He said he had “ample evidence in other areas that prove that we’re not turning back, that we’re moving forward, with openness, with reform, with political debate.”

The situation is “obviously demoralizing,” says one young female activist who prefers to remain anonymous because of security concerns. “Every single important leftist is in prison. They’re arresting everyone. We’ve given up on street work.”

But with the streets increasingly off limits, Egypt’s online activist community is remaining active and has picked up the slack, reaching out to counterparts abroad and organizing an effective awareness campaign around Abdel-Fatah.

“Alaa didn’t write that much in the beginning,” says Ms. Hassan. She adds that their blog “wasn’t very political a year and a half ago,” when it was started. “It changed as we changed.”

The site freealaa.blogspot.com (created within 24 hours of Abdel-Fatah’s arrest) documents all new developments in his case and those of other detained activists.

“It’s easier to tell the story of Alaa, and then go back to other detainees,” says Amr Gharbeia, a friend of Abdel-Fatah and the author of an award-winning political blog in Arabic. “He’s been covered in the media, he’s much more connected.”

Close to 1,000 people have signed an automated petition form, demanding the Abdel-Fatah’s release, which is sent to both Egyptian and American officials.

Like many Arab countries, Egypt is experiencing a steep growth in Internet users and bloggers. “There were 500 blogs six months ago,” says Mr. Gharbeia, “there are 1,000 now. The number is doubling every six months.”

The Internet has allowed Egyptian activists not only to coordinate local events, but also to reach out to international activist networks when in need.

Gharbeia says local bloggers have coordinated efforts before, but that the campaign for Abdel-Fatah’s release is “the first time we do something this big.”

“A lot of people write and say: We heard about this and what can we do?” says Hassan. Already, small demonstrations have been planned or carried out in front of Egyptian consulates or embassies in Washington, Chicago, New York, San Francisco, London, and Paris.

Meanwhile, no one knows when Abdel-Fataha and the other activists will be released. According to Egyptian law, their detentions could be renewed indefinitely.

The young blogger concluded his last post describing conversations with other inmates: “I have to explain about the judges and I have to explain why I’m here, why it’s worth it, and to be frank I’ve no idea why. It isn’t worth being away from Manal for three days let alone 30 (very well, Egypt), but I can’t really say that, can I?”

Copyright 2006, The Christian Science Monitor

Cost and Revenue, Part 4 of the forums guide

[Rev 0.1, Requires Revision, please excuse any language mistakes]
Sure you started to wonder what are the sources of revenue, is it worth it, will you have any return on your investment, should you exert the effort and go for it?
First let’s discuss the Cost then potential sources of revenue.
9-Cost
This is measured in time, money and personnel units.
How long will planning for the forums take of your time and others, what expenses will the hosting, chosen forum software, additional modules, skins, advertisements and bulk mail advertising campaigns cost you as well as the number you need to volunteer or recruit in your team.
You need to have a very clear vision and rigit figures reflecting your monthly and yearly expenses and how it will grow with the growth of content provided, user base, services and backups.
There are primary and preliminary costs that are paid one time to start the service, then there are recurring costs that you will keep on paying as long as the service is running and growing.
Try to look for the best package provided where you balance between storage space, available technology(database,web server), backup, support, speed of server, network throughput, available monthly bandwidth, host administrative control panels, mail relay, ftp, ssh and all other hosting related criteria.
10-Revenue and Profit
Try to have the following as optional sources of revenue and profit, choose as it suits your content and users nature:
1-Donations and Sponsorship
If your content serves a certain cause, you can ask your users to donate to keep the service running. If certain businesses are interested in what you are providing or interested in your audience, they can be your sponsors covering your expenses and more.
2-Online Sensitive Ads
You can subscribe to online sensitive ads providers like google adsense and others. Plan where to place your ads wisely, not annoying your users whilst having high expectancy of being clicked, due to relevance with nearby content and style.
3-Service packages
You can provide special service packages for monthly or yearly subscriptions offering more services to your members.
Those services could be exclusive to paid members or an upgrade to an existing free service.
Examples like storage space for file storage, photos album, email address, mobile notifications, blog space, match making, special instant messaging programs, access to early beta versions of your forum software, special skins,…etc.
4-Souvenirs
Nice decent sweet items that reflects the identity of your forum and service. Those items could be mugs, T-shirts, paper, backgrounds, themes, desktop programs, pens, special tickets to conferences..etc
5-Contests
Make contests related to the content you serve, you could raise funds and give awards to winners, you could donate part of it for charity as well.
6-Partnerships
You could partner with certain ISP or mobile provider or Carrier or Shop, providing cheaper services or coupons to your members if they buy or use their service using your referal code.
7-Exclusive Stuff
You could provide tickets to certain concerts, software licenses, online services like broadcasting matches, shows or any other stuff totally exclusive and not provided through other providers.
As you can see, It is all a matter of partnerships, relations you build with providers, competitors, sponsors and ofcourse your members.
A profit can easily come if you plan wisely what to provide, when and how.

Time to complete your plan, wait for the next part of the guide ;)

How to secure your forums, third part of the planning guide

[Rev 0.1, Requires Revision, please excuse any language mistakes]
Back to the forum planning guide, this part will talk about considering the security in your plan.
8-Security
First let's discuss what security stands for when considering a forum, well securing a forum is concerned with:
1-Privacy of User's details, private messages and any unshared data
2-Protection against Spam
3-Protection of users' passwords
4-Protection against bandwidth abuse
5-Protection against attacks (server, code,...etc attacks)
6-Protection against content overload (multiple registration, posts, ..etc)
7-Protection against abuse and harrasment
8-Protection against misrepresentation
9-Protection against shadowing and cloning
10-Protection against hardware failures
Let's talk about each in more details:
1-Privacy
You need to make your users confident that their profile details, private messages box, dashboards, settings, notepads, private folders and images, all are secured and are shared only according to user's chosen configurations, no other users, moderators or administrators are sneaking around checking his private stuff.
You can ensure that by using technology that encrypts his data on storage, you can make all parties agree on not breaking that rule in the agreement statement and talk about it your disclaimer and legal statements.
2-Spam
Spam is all about unwanted posts, content that is not in its normal place, that is used to advertise for other sites, forums, services or is misleading users and rumouring false facts. You need to have a clear defined strict policy against spam, all your moderators should monitor posts against that content, and punishment, banning, blocking of content, users and ip addresses that were the source of that, should take place.
You need to put certain measures that protects your forum from automated spam that is generated by certain tools. You might need certain photo validation mechanisms before a post is made, or a time span of 5 minutes or so between each post, comment, blog,... and the next one.
3-Authentication
It is very critical that you protect your user's passwords, because once an account is hijacked and someone impresonates another user and starts posting and sending messages around the place phishing his personality, this will result in huge damages in terms of users' trust.
Use the latest technology in authentication, encryption and protection of data transmitted over the wire and in your database.
4-Bandwidth
All servers have certain limitation, according to your hosting plan, you have a limited amount of allowed bandwidth and bandwidth traffic. You have to make sure users are not abusing your forums, refering other users to content on your forum by giving them direct links or just loading the photos or multimedia on their own website without anyone coming to your forum or even knowing it ever existed. Measures to do that are through configuring your web server not to allow serving of content outside the boundaries of requests originating from localhost.
You should also protect your service against users opening multiple sessions of your forum, exhausting your bandwidth. Limit that in terms of sessions per ip address or per user logged in. Most forums as well doesn't allow any content to be served until you register, otherwise guests have nothing to read but disclaimer and privacy statements.
5-Attacks
Hackers will attempt to hack your service, this is just a fact and you cannot escape it. So better take all measures and steps to protect your service. Protect it on all levels, starting by your host, ending by your forum.
Learn more about your host, your server, your web server, the file system, everything related to service, and how far is it protected, are there any updates or vulnerabilities that are published and not patched, check for all that and secure it or ask the host to do it for you.
Then comes the database, secure it by applying patches, using secure connections, using strong passwords, try to have your data encrypted, have it backed up and cleaned on schedule.
Choose proper forums, that have good and proven tight security, be aware of any updates they release, subscribe to their newsletter and have some good developer in your team if possible, he can from time to time forecast vulnerabilities or problems with the service and help you patch them.
Do not expose critical details regarding your host, database or administrative login to anyone unless trusted.
Be ready for denial of service attacks or worms that tends to eat the contact list of users and sends them endless amount of spam. The moment such attack finds way, be ready with a plan to immediately stop the service, take the forum offline, change the password of the database to halt this attack and reduce the damage. If you managed to rescue the logs, find out who did this attack and report it to your host, FBI and all related agencies.
6-Flooding
Take sufficient measures to prevent abusers from posting duplicate posts or comments, registering multiple times thus flooding your service with useless information.
This will irritate your users and might drive them away.
Try certain strategies to prevent that, you could use certain graphic validation photos with characters and numbers in them and the user has to write that again to validate he's human. Ok now it is human, how to prevent that human from repeatedly posting the same content, simply block that ip address or user from posting a second time in less than a certain amount of time.
7-Abuse
Do not tolerate any incident that reports harresment or abuse that occurs to one of your users.
You cannot allow any user to use your forum as a channel for crime or abuse or any type of misconduct, you need to have your moderators checking for any report of that kind. Allow an always open channel to report such kind of activities, either through direct links on forum, an email address or through instant or private messaging to a moderator. Take these reports seriously and consider verifying them first before taking any action.
8-Misrepresentation
Stay alert for what other sites, forums, partners and affiliates write about your site, its users, how they represent your goal and mission. Many won't like a successful site to exist, so they will start fighting you by misrepresenting your service, users and content. Try to handle this and solve it early enough, target the roots of the problem and deal with it.
Be always clear in your content, make your policies transparent and be close to your team and users. This way rumours will never find a place in your community, and all your users will act as your ambassadors praising your service and inviting others to enjoy it.
9-Cloning
Many web masters would plan to build a business using your successful content. They will try to clone, copy and paste, the content you have, invite your members, advertise for their service and claim they were the original owners and authors of your content. There are many ways to fight this back, first of all why not publish and expose a legal channel for any one to consume and read your content without visiting your web site interface but at the same time they are still consuming that service from your web server, it still has your forums name on it, they might also be your registered users. You can do that through feeds, RSS, ATOM or others.
Now to prove your content is genuine and your users are the ones who created it, make sure enough search engine bots are crawling your forums, taking in your content and taging its date.
Your feeds should also have that time tag as well.
Work on having a copyright statement everywhere, investigate on the exact legal required statements that will enable you to protect your content and sue anyone who duplicates it without prior notice.
10-Backup
You will always need that, Backup. You never know what might happen wrong with your configurations, maybe you face an attack and have all your data wiped. What happens if there is a hardware failure and all your stuff is unrecoverable. You always need ready backups, snapshots, incremental ones, have your own backup plan.
You need to consider the available space, media, speed and importance of data when choosing a backup plan. Try to automate that task, try also to automate the recovery task to make it easy to get your service back, up and running fast.
Consider all the above security measures when choosing a host, forum application, database and management team.

More about the revenue and business planning for your forum is in the next part.

Free the Bloggers, Free Alaa

It is a sad thing that Bloggers are being detained and taken to prison.
I don't know where Egypt is going actually, news reporters, bloggers and judges, anyone who speaks is taken away and shot in the head.
More about Alaa's story:
http://www.manalaa.net/alaa_detained_15_days
Join us to Free Alaa, the idea we have is to empower blogging and bloggers in Egypt, follow the words and idea of "Boring Lips":
-----------------------------------------
Stronger Blogging

We all know that some bloggers were detained and so some of other bloggers are much worried about that. We don't know for sure what is going to happen. El3en Elsehrya suggested in a post entitled The Test that the only protection bloggers may have is gaining more strength. I believe that one of the means to gain strength is to be more popular especially among those who are not activists. So, I decided to make a list containing all blogs that I know and which are concerned with the political and societal scene in Egypt with not so much posts about the author's self. This way, I can link to it from any instant messaging programme and from any newsgroup I use. The list doesn't reflect my own view it is just a list of those blogs concerned with the current scene in Egypt. It doesn't matter who goes public, what counts is that we must make blogging more popular. The list is still limited.

The Test Post Link:
http://almeezan.blogspot.com/2006/05/test.html

I am asking all of you to email me any links of blogs that meet the criteria I mentioned above so I up-date the list every time I receive links. You will find my email in my profile Boring Lips. And I also asking you to link to this post even from your blogs. Send the link to as many people as you can. This way blogging will become stronger as more people will be aware of it.

Security by hiding has been proven to be the least successful method. Our only protection is to be popular so that we are protected by people's awareness. Also, this way will spread all of our ideas among a much wider audience.
Please Link to:
http://almeezan.blogspot.com/2006/05/stronger-blogging.html

نعرف أن بعض المدونين قد تم إعتقالهم و هذا يقلق البعض. إحنا ما نعرفش إيه إللى هيحصل على وجه التحديد. العين السحرية اقترح فى مدونة إسمها الإمتحانThe Test إن الحماية الوحيدة للمدونين إنهم يصبحوا أكثر قوة. أعتقد أن وسيلة من الوسائل هى إن ناس أكثر من النشطاء و غيرهم يعرفوا و يهتموا بالمدونات. عشان كده عملت قائمة بأسماء المدونات اللى بتكلم عن الحالة السياسية و الإجتماعية فى مصر و لا تضم الكثير عن حياة صاحبها/صاحبتها الشخصية اللى أنا عرفها. كده أقدر اربطها من أى مكان...مواقع تانية أو أدي الرابط لكل اللى أعرفه. القائمة لا تعبر عن المدونات التى أحب أطالعها و لكنها تتضمن على المدونات المهتمة بالموضوع مع إختلاف أرائها.

لأو ممكن تبعتلى أى روابط لمدونات مشابهة ده هيساعد كثير. الإيميل بتاعى فى البروفيل. و ياريت تربط للقائمة من البلوج أو من أى موقع تانى. ممكن كمان تستخدم الم س ن عشان ناس أكثر تعرف عن البلوجز. بالطريقة دى ناس أكثر هتعرف إحنا بنقول إيه.
Please Link to:
http://almeezan.blogspot.com/2006/05/stronger-blogging.html
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Manal and Alaa's bucket:
http://www.manalaa.net/

Serve the Cause, Start your blog today!

Working from Home

I have recently been hired as a team leader for an american company, we work from home.
This is a total new experience to me, Being used to the workplace, driving each day to work, sitting on a desk in some office, greeting friends everyday and making my coffee..it is just different, you know?
I manage 3 people, it is all about projects, deliverables, ensuring proper coding guidelines are followed, quality measures are in place, new requirements and design are accommodated and applied. Then comes the administrative work, from timesheets, invoices, daily reports, learning projects, meetings, team leaders planning and coordination with usa teams.
At home, you have your cable, broadband, AC, privacy, own workplace, you can set your own rules, work the way you like.
You have a chance to use the morning to make official papers, visit the bank, do some shopping, talk to friends...etc
You also get to gain american work experience, understand the process and work dynamics of american companies.
Salaries are relatively acceptable compared to other salaries offered in your home town but compared to usa they make you eligible for social aid.
You can also have a daytime job, or apply for masters or PhD, take some course or read some book, involve your self in some activity or sports.
The problem is you start to lose your health, not going out, staying in one place for a long time, not seeing people...etc
You also lose benefits like health insurance, social insurance and any labor rights -if there were any in your country. But you get to pay no taxes as your contract is with a foreign company from another country. Basically your status with your home land is unemployed.
Outsourcing business is good for developing countries but bad for developed ones, I can feel that as I am applying for canadian immigration and due to the fact that Canada is outsourcing as well, I might not find any openings or decent jobs when I get to go there one day.
It is a hard equation, its solution is simply getting developing countries to be developed, providing better education and making solid rules for minimum accepted salaries, investing in technology and changing government strategies to foster that business.
Anyways, I will be traveling to usa with my B1/B2 visa next month on a business trip to attend some training, meet my american managers and maybe go to tech-ed conference, more details about that trip will be posted later.

Part 2 of the planning for your forums guide

[Rev 0.1, Requires Revision, please excuse any language mistakes]
Continuing on the Planning phase, we come to:
7-Team
Now, this is the vital and most critical part of your planning process. Your team determines and forecasts your early success or failure.
By Team I mean administrators, technical support, developers, designers, super moderators, moderators and news posters.
At start you won't have all those roles, it will be narrowed to just administrator(s) and moderators.
An administrator should have good knowledge of how to use, run and manage forums, understand how to make backups, fix user problems, create, edit and modify existing forums, add or remove roles and assign them to user groups and single users, as well as make occasional health checks on the system and check any exception or database mail errors.
**Administrator(s) is the one to decide when to upgrade, how to upgrade, when to take forums offline and how to notify people early enough, making the process as smooth as possible.
That role has to have enough knowledge about hosting, domain names, how to resolve and properly configure DNS, MX and other related records concerned with the service.
An administrator should also pickup statistics from host and from forum and provide reports to the owner/founder of the forum -which should be you.
This brings us to the founder role, you as a founder, will act as the God Father of all roles, you work side by side with the administrator, following up his decisions, noticing his learning curve and helping him with resources, you do the strategic planning, he implements your plans and vision.
Single or multiple administrators?
It depends on the following:
-The availability of your staff, if your administrator is available only 12 hours a day or so, you need more than one to work in a shift fashion.
-The knowledge and skills, you might need backup administrators, who can take over when something wrong happens and your basic administrator is unable to deal with the situation.
-The state your forum has reached, in terms of number of users, posts, categories, hosting costs, recovery costs, in general, the more famous your forum is, the more you need more professional staff working on it 24/7, supporting your users, adding new features and content, monitoring errors and resolving problems, managing moderators and making sure the content is clean and readable.
-How far will your administrators go, are they volunteering or asking for money, will they sell you and your users list anytime soon, exposing the privacy of your users and taking your content away, or are they faithful, they share your vision and dream, and consider your success theirs. Sometimes a number of administrators can cause a riot against you, they can simply split, taking everything and building a forum of their own, it is important to carefully choose your staff and keep them loyal.
**Moderator(s) are those who manage the content of each forum, their basic roles and responsibilities include:
-Moderation of posts, they have to follow the general guidelines in evaluating whether or not a post is against the forum policy or not.
-Initiation of topics, they can offline and online through talking to users in private or public start new hot topics that they know are of some interest to their users.
-Constant replies on posts related to the forum they moderate if addressed to them, they have to participate and debate making an example to other users, they also provide first line of support, answering users questions about how to use certain features of forum and guiding them to check the frequently asked questions or help sections.
-They recommend certain delegation or banning of users to administrators based on their posts nature and general reported complaints from other users.
-They usually prone or archive older posts, clean up their forums, reorder or merge related posts as well as stick certain posts or announcements.
A moderator should be an active poster, you can either choose him from the beginning, or wait and pick him up from your registered users.
You can decide whom to choose based on the quality of his posts, how dedicated he is to your forum, how friendly he is and whether or not he is liked and famous between other users, how many others did he invite or influence to come to your site and most important what are you ready to give him in terms of access privilege, the inner circle, sharing your plans with him, spreading rumors through him to users...etc.
Moderators are very important, they are your eyes and ears between the members, they feel and understand the nature of the users and what they actually need.
A good and healthy relationship with your moderators, means a successful forum, you will be able to know your users well, and to route to them your plans and future provisioned services.
It is important to have general criteria on how to choose your staff, for example:
-Make sure they have good writing skills and can express themselves as well as understand others.
-They have to be helpful, listen to others and know how to react in severe situations.
-They have to be respectful, respecting themselves, you and others.
-They can't be of the easy to get bored type, they have to have patience and wide scope.
-Choose the type that thinks before talking, that plans before implementing and reacts after situation has been properly assessed.
-Try to know what hidden agendas do they have, and will that agenda work with yours well or harm it.

That's it for this part, see you in the next one.

My 2 cents about planning, deploying and administrating forums

[Rev 0.1, Requires Revision, please excuse any language mistakes]
What’s the story?
People want to talk, express themselves, have their uniqueness and creativity unleashed.
Well that’s alright, this moves the business wheel, causes various types of content to be served together with ads. Gets you hits from all types of audience and popularity on the internet scale with not so much administrative effort from your side.
Forums continuously grow with the posts its members send, the type of content they exchange and how well it stands.
So the catch is what content would gather the biggest number of users, make them loyal and stick around.
It varies according to culture, language, gender, age and time, you can choose a topic that is so hot and everyone interested to talk about, but for only sometime before it goes away and people find another hot topic, or you could choose topics that are permanently the core interest of a certain or all slices of society.
It is a typical tradeoff, the more general the topics you choose, the more anyone can participate but they can easily find alternative forums or websites discussing that, and the more specific topics, the less the number of participants who are interested but the harder other forums can compete with the topics on your forum.

Planning for a Community
When you start to plan for your own community, forum, blogs, photo album, file storage, ads exchange, think large, think out of the box, think what would bring hundreds of thousands of users to your community, although you hardly have one user yet.
Putting in account that large volume of user, you will take well calculated decisions during the planning phase.
What are the aspects to consider when planning?
1-Language
What languages do you know? Does it really matter, maybe you have two or so friends who know English and some other language and would share with you the administration and moderation of the forum or community, this way you can launch large, start with a few languages targeting diverse audience. It might be good to have that, but would you always be aware what’s happening in a forum not speaking your language, do you trust the strategy and manageability of your friends, if you do, then go for it, if not then stick with your limited language choices.
What about the type of language, slang, mixed, hybrid, will you allow people to chat using clear English or slang or English characters representing another language..etc. Think how will this affect yout users, if you open the door, not everyone will understand what others are saying, leading to being pissed of, blocking your site and never visiting it again, or you would just target your site to a certain limited number of people who understand that hybrid language.
Defined the language, its type, now consider the technicalities related to language, what forums and what browsers support the language you chose, is it widely available and accessible. Will everyone be able to browse and view the characters properly, or chances are half the people will consider it a Chinese or spam site.
Now think money, the language you chose, how will it drive ads into your site, sensitive ads go through your content and get the closest proper ad match, if it cannot understand your language, it cannot display any ads.
What about hit exchange, the best way to market your site is to have a list of affiliates, partners and ad exchange sites, these are other forums that complement yours, once you are on good terms with them, you form together a bigger community, each specializing in a certain topic, so would your language choice have a good number of candidate partners and affiliates.
In terms of cost, certain language character set costs too much in term of database storage, slower in retrieval, encoding, searching and bandwidth consumption per request, are all these not an issue to you, or you have certain limitations, consider that when deciding.
Once you make your mind, your language choice will be used in categories, forums, and posts. You can though provide multilingual menus and skins, it doesn’t matter much if that was provided with your chosen forum base code.
You will use that language in the agreement, and maybe the registration form to ensure your user knows that language and is not a sad spammer.
2-Topic
Know you are constrained with the chosen language, which constraints your audience, so limit your topic choices according to that audience.
Take your time deciding about the topic, go around and see what do people like, search for and have hard times finding and collecting from a vast number of sites.
People would definitely like to have such stuff in one place, know others like them looking for that same stuff and share their experiences with one another.
Be smart, find a topic that will continuously be a core of debate, discussions and people’s need. Try to think how to make that topic appealing to more people through the time, the increasing number of members, posts and depth of topics discussed.
Do not always use yourself as a reference, think of others, they surely know different stuff than you, come from different backgrounds, have their own fantasies and desires.
Try to think in terms of audience, partners and ads. The durability of your topic is important, it also has not to allow too much spam or abuse, it has to target intelligent and smart people who won’t just keep using your site reading and reading and never contribute a thing, or click on an ad, or go to some partner site.
You need active and proactive users, so you could either look for that type and see what topics they like most or choose a topic and survey what kind of people would be interested in it.
Make sure you are careful with your choices, sometimes debate can cause fights and make your forum a war zone, this might end up with a very bad experience and sad memory in the minds of all your visitors, so instead of recommending your site, they will advise people to walk away.
Don’t fall for hot content, everyone needs it, so everyone will visit you, well they will be abusing you, taking that hot content from you, putting any crap posts and just leaving. Hot content might be movies, music or books that no one could find anywhere, be smart you can relay that to some other partner site, while keeping your loyal users inside, whenever they need such type of one time use content they can just visit your partner hungry to hits site and then back to you.
Why would they come back to you, because simply they will feel some respect from you as their discussions provider, you won’t have popups all over the place trying to cover up your hot content expenses like your partner, nor your content will be all about some useless chit, in fact the more interesting your topic and sub topics are, the more your users will have a better chance to gain knowledge, share experiences, make friends and even donate to keep you running.
3-Story
Have a decent war hero type of story, a challenging interesting tale that everyone would be proud to hear and carry on to different users, about how this forum was built, planned for and its topics chosen.
You can think of certain incidents or legends or some coincident that got that forum thought in your mind and how you and your friends dedicated yourself to the world, to make this thing happen.
How it cost you to build it, in terms of time, effort and money, while you were pleased with your visitors and users using your service for free, just make it romantic, heroic, a true sound story.
4-Fashion
Forum and community style is very important. If it is too trivial, you get empty headed people that can hardly type or know what they want to say, if it is so sophisticated, you will get complicated serial killers who just escaped prison or some geeks who will attempt to hack your site, email, destroy your laptop and lock down your host.
Be moderate, choose colors that talks with the soul and mind, common sense the menus and options, keep it simple, straight, light for the dialup and broadband users.
Above all, make it professional light or heavy, not a pimp site with purples, moving objects and balloons.
Enable and Empower the user, by giving him room for his personality to appear, you can do this by allowing several skins, lite or heavy versions, the ability to even upload their own skin.
5-Tools
It is all about that Empowerment concept, give your user enough tools to show what he feels, from smiley emoticons to professional rich text editors, to control panels and scratch pads, dashboards, signatures, notifications, subscriptions, avatars, ranks, history, ability to search, personal message, share photos, files, RSS feeds, news, personal contacts, invitations, blogging,… the whole 9 yards.
6-Technology
It is all about these terms:
Hosting Costs and Options, Support and Backup, Documentation, Community Modules, extensibility, upgradeability and Speed.
Go grab yourself all forums in market, check their requirements, try to install and deploy them on your machine, now compare their speeds, ease of use, installation, available versions, expected next release and how easy it is to upgrade, the available licenses and cost, their provided support, modules, closed or open code, easy to hack or secure with no vulnerabilities, knowledge base, and skins.
Now think in terms of hosting, to host all that, what it takes, what database, server and storage is required, what backup and deployment options does it require and how much do you have in your pocket.
You can provision certain stages in your plan, you can start small expected a small number of users and when you fulfill your primary goals you can upgrade hosting and even use other types of forums that handles more requests efficiently.
But remember, it takes time, money and effort to build a user trust, You do not want to lose that because of some technical details of hosting or backup or upgrading that he doesn’t give a damn about. He wants his forum available around the clock, he will come back to see who liked what he wrote and if his favorite contacts wrote new topics or not, are there any new photos in some friends’ album, …etc
The moment, they feel that their data is unsecure, that they might lose their posts, fotos, blogs or private messages, they are gone with no return.

I believe this is enough for one post, expect more to come in later publications.