The development team at Lefora has been hard at work for many weeks on an entirely new infrastructure, code named Aardvark.  Aardvark is like Lefora 2.0, it’s an entirely new code base, rewritten in the Python 2.6 programming language.

Over the next few weeks, we will be stress testing Lefora 2.0 on various forums before releasing it across the network.  We’ve already started an early beta period on one forum, hackyour.lefora.com.  We’ll be upgrading our support forum soon.  We’ll continue to post updates about this release in our Support forum’s News & Announcements category.

As Lefora 2.0 is a full re-write of our current service, we haven’t added any new features (yet), our initial release will basically look no different then your current forum.  However, going forward it will allow for many improvements:

• With a new optimized code base, the Lefora team can have more rapid development times and release cycles.  a.k.a., it’ll be easier for us to build and release new features onto your forum.
• The new code base will improve our scalability, so that we can continue to grow at a rapid pace and still serve up forum pages quite quickly.
• We’ll be able to offer more ‘core’ configuration options for your forum, such as a large library of themes for you to customize and edit.

From a question posted over at the popular The Admin Zone forum, a number of admins of forums are debating the value of traffic from social networking websites like facebook and twitter.  I decided to run some stats on our 80,000+ forums and see just what type of traffic the major social networks bring, and how likely would a visitor be to explore a forum, or bounce and leave the site.

Below is a chart of visitor activity to Lefora.com forums from popular social networks.

A few interesting stats:

• 1/3 of all our traffic comes from search engines, mostly google.  This traffic tends to be slightly lower performing then our site averages, and something we’re working on improving.
• Facebook is the 5th most popular referrer to our forums (of any website), it is over 5x as popular as myspace for referring traffic.  However, there are two reasons for this.  1, we offer Facebook Connect integration to make it easy to post updates to your facebook wall from the forum, and 2, myspace blocks all outbound links on their site with a scary intermediate page warning people they are leaving the myspace garden.
• Social networking sites generally far out perform the average activity on our site, from pages per visit, time on site, and most importantly, a lower bounce rate (meaning people find what’s interesting in the forums after they click through a link on a social network.

For more Lefora Stats, be sure to check our recently added real-time Stats page.

With the start of the New Year, we have big plans here at Lefora on building out new features for your forums – we’ll especially be focused on features to help mature communities faster – from ranking & point systems to widgets that will help promote your forum outside of lefora.  We’ll also be building an API to offer more services for developers to ‘hook’ into Lefora.

We launched less than a year ago, but in 2008, we’ve seen 1.85 million people visit your 40,000+ forums.  With an average visit time of 6 min 20 seconds.  A third of the traffic to the forums comes straight from people searching on google, yahoo, and the other search engines – much of this comes from the search engine optimization (seo) that we build directly into your forum.

Cheers!
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Santé!

When we first launched Lefora, we made a decision early on to refer to our service as a ‘forum’ as it’s an abstract idea that people are very familiar with – it predates the web.

Ultimately, we see Lefora as enabling communities to do more online – the ‘forum’ is the essential core of any group coming together to communicate. We’re focused on the conversation, but have many social features surrounding the forum, from a headlines page featuring hot topics based on community participation, to member profiles that feature everything a person says across the forum. We’ve added other features like thumbs up & down to offer community moderation, email notifications to encourage members to return to the site, and search engine optimization to ensure new people find a lefora site via a google search.

A friend sent us a nice article, How to Grow a Customer Forum into a Social Media Site, that highlights the changes that one company took to evolve their standard forum to a place where their customers could come together online – which ultimately benefits the company by building a community around their product.

The case study makes some good points, specifically highlighting how:

• A community attracts more web traffic
• Connects with consumers
• Empowers brand advocates to spread their message
• Builds interest and expertise

Russell Beattie put together a great piece about the value of forums and explores some of the behaviors on larger forums, such as 4chan.org.

http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/my-fascination-with-web-forums

Russell talks of the importance at times of anonymous (guest) posts – like their low barrier to entry. The drawback are the spammers that take advantage of the system. That’s why we’re building out anti-spam support, similar to what exists on services like gmail and wordpress to keep the forum ‘doors’ open but block the spam with some tough bouncers.

Another interesting post of his, is the concept of ‘no spam or trolls‘ on twitter, thanks to the one-way friending functionality. This is close to something we’ll be building out around lefora as we’ll be adding support for ‘fans’ and ‘foes’ later this year. With the idea that posts from your foes will be collapsed automatically to help prevent the incited arguments by trolls. We hope to be able to extract community level ranking out of this as well (a person frequently marked as a foe or with many thumb down remarks.)

Robot Scoble swung into our office today to interview Paul and get a demo of our new service. He was impressed with our new theme color editor, which is a simple slider that allows you to adjust all the colors in your forum with a simple drag of the mouse.

Watch the Interview

and watch the Demo

We believe that forums are essential to online communities. lefora was started to bring forums up to speed with the latest ’social’ and ‘technological’ trends seen across many of the ‘web2.0′ sites that have popped up over the past few years (has it really been that long?)

The existing forum market is huge, however the options that exists for everyday people are pretty slim. You pretty much have phpBB and derivatives, vBulletin, InvisionPowerBoards, or something tacked onto a larger service (like facebook’s groups). We want to change all that with an offering that is simple to use, fun to use, and makes life easy for admins and moderators. And that’s why we created lefora forums.

This blog will try to focus on a few things:

• Where are forums headed?
• What makes for a successful forum?
• How do forums enable “community”?

We’ll talk about our own vision, but we’ll also bring in forum admins from across the web to get their take as well.

Remember, forums pre-date the web, but they don’t have to feel that way.