John Horton

Only a few years ago I could not find a way to do this. Now I see a number of user-friendly software solutions. Silly me. I will report back when I work it all out.

@JoelR I think you are right. This might be more doable than I thought.

The fact that you have not heard of IPS Live Topics says a lot about how hot or not the product is. It is a IPS specific tool that merges a YouTube live stream with a live chat. It makes sense for a produced live stream like a product demo. If it used Zoom it would be awesome for podcast interviews. Because it only uses YouTube live stream it would require a bit of production to use for a remote interview. I am asking in the hope that I misunderstand or that there is a workaround.

@JoelR I really wish I could have gotten SendGrid to work. IDK what I was do doing wrong. As far as only using current members' emails, I want to do the opposite. I am looking to bring back old members who have not visited in a long time.

@Nomad My list is 100% from user accounts in my forum. I have run my site since 2008 so I have been growing the list for a long time. As my forum subject is obscure I believe my list is very high quality. In other words, someone would have to be legitimately interested in my small niche to register for my site. I do not sell anything to my readers so I do not have a conversion rate. My business is all ad sales.

Well, this is a hot topic for me this week. I have more questions than answers. Most of the time I do this for clients. I charge $500 per mail campaign. I think this is dirt cheap. I have 8k addresses in IPS database and 6.5k in MailChimp. These are the same users but the Mailchimp data has bounces and unsubs weeded out. I did a mail push this week straight from the default IPS bulk mail tool. The problem is I have no idea of the open rate or delivery rate of the emails. It is a black hole. Hell, it might have been great. I did get a result for the campaign I was promoting but maybe all that traffic was organic. The report says 600 clicks. Is that opens or clicks on the link in the mail? I tried to config SendGrid. Could not get it to work. The support guys at IPS tried to help but suspect I did something wrong when I autogenerated the DNS settings I sent in. As is my usual issue with IPS the one thing that is lacking is good documentation.

I am looking for successful use cases for Live Topics. I have some ideas on how it could be used if it streamed Zoom but it only streams YouTube. If it worked with Zoom I can see hosting an interview and then fielding questions from the public. None of this would be a problem if my interview subjects were local. Not the case and that is why I need Zoom. Sure, I could have a celebrity stream themselves and them take questions but the odds of technical failure are too large.

I have been trying to get my SendGrid - Sender Authentication DNS settings for my cloud account set for a week now. Pretty sure I am driving the support guys at IPS crazy. Likely I am doing something wrong and have no idea. Anyhow... I was under the impression that using a service like SendGrid would substantially increase my deliverability vs emailing from the default IPS mail tool. Is that right? Do any of you do an occasional Newsletter or mass mailing from the stock IPS mail tool? My mailing list is a mostly untapped resource.

I watched a couple of the version 5 videos and I don't really know what there is to be super excited about. Yes, the UI is fresh and for all I know the underlying code some sort of improvement. It's got some whiz bang features but I'm having trouble seeing how they're going to grow traffic. At the end of the day it is a message board/ web forum. How sexy can it be? The current version is stable, quite good form my perspective and my readers get what they're looking for. So what is the compelling reason to endure the upgrade?

what you guys are telling me is what I had long suspected. thanks

FYI - I understand what they do but do not see the great value especially if the users are setting the tags.

When I moved to IPS about a year ago I did not give Prefixes and Tags a lot of thought. I guess I do not understand what I am missing. Any wisdom?

@JoelR If it would meaningfully grow traffic then yes. From a pure business perspective, how do you quantify that? My forum & site is the only the active site in my niche except whatever happens at Facebook and I am a known personality in my arena. When I personally create more videos and content for the site it is obviously good for the site but I can not see an impact in traffic data. The same is true when elite athletes in the sport post. I am in a very small niche so maybe I have a different reality. I can see how a a bigger site might spend some percentage of revenue for good content. I think this only makes sense if the site were new or the business was big enough to budget for it. If I forked out $500 a month for paid content the ROI would be in the negative.

I have watched the traffic on my site become more and more mobile over the years. 15 years ago it was more than 75% desktop. Today is more like 60% mobile. Since I am banner ad dependent my most expensive ads are placed for mobile.

maybe my site is small ball but I can not imagine the the ROI of paying for forum content. To be helpful it would have to be high-quality content and that is not going to be cheap. I assume the desired effect is more traffic. What is the acceptable cost metric for additional traffic?

the ironic part of the whole thing is I am asking IPS support for DNS edits so I can set up sender authentication with SendGrid. This might be the most textbook example of irony I have ever personally experienced.

@JoelR As far as why the original emails were not getting my to my primary email address, Yes I searched junk and deleted folders repeatedly. Why those emails did not go through is a bazar extra rabbit hole on this whole fiasco that I have given up on. It makes no sense. By any other measure that email account and app work as it should. I have 20 unread emails and 5 junk emails to be reviewed this morning.

So you think you've had a frustrating week? Wife was home with the flu and 9 yr old was home with pink eye but that was not really the good part. Last weekend, I emailed a IPS support ticket and then a second ticket midweek. After not hearing anything back for a day or so, I posted in the Tech Help forum. A staff member replied that the staff had addressed both issues within 30 minutes of my original ticket. I looked in my email and could not find the messages, so I went back to the forum and asked for the emails to be resent. Again, nothing. After a number of back-and-forth messages with staff in the forum, I assumed the issue could be with my primary email. So, I attempted to use my old Gmail account, which was also set as my alternate email in IPS. I deleted the alternate account email, but the IPS system would not let me make it my primary because it was already associated with my account. Jim M suggested that I send in a ticket to disassociate my Gmail account from my IPS account, but I did not totally understand. Instead, I created a new Gmail account, went back into the forum, and requested the support replies to be resent again. FINE. WHATEVER. It worked, and I could see all the messages. I noticed that my original email was also on the messages, so the original issue is really with my GoDaddy/Microsoft/Outlook email. So, problem solved? NOPE. After one or two exchanges with IPS support, I logged off all my Google accounts. When I logged back in, my new Gmail account is locked, and Google is not accepting my phone number to send a verification code. So, I tried my wife’s number, wife’s work cell, my brother's cell, an old Google Voice number, a random old friend's number, and in each case, Google gives me "This phone number cannot be used for verification." Imagine my forehead impacting my desk over and over again at this point. So angry. So now, I have again changed my IPS contact email to my 9-year-old daughter's Gmail account just so I can ask for a small DNS tweak. I am optimistic that this whole thing is done. This is how a twenty-minute project consumes the bulk of two full workdays. If you find that thread on the IPS where I am asking for support and think I sound neurotic, now you know why. And yeah, go ahead and laugh.

When I started my forum 20 years ago it was not a business. It was a community I wanted. It was a place for a group of friends who were very committed to a sport to talk about technique and gear. There was some goofy banter, but a large portion of the conversation was focused. Many of us were nationally ranked-athletes. We all knew the skill level and experience of each other. The most vocal of us were legitimate experts in our sport. New members came looking for knowledge. The quality of the discussions was the draw. As the user base grew the average user had less and less knowledge. By the time the forum reached peak traffic about 6 years ago, the most knowledgeable users found themselves overwhelmed with posts from overconfident knuckleheads. In the frame of Dunning-Kruger the user base was moving toward the left on the chart. For the most part, I have thought of this problem under the paradigm of “Signal to Noise”. Fresh content is the lifeblood of forums but if the quality of the content is low it has to eventually burn itself out. You can’t just ban enthusiastic new members who constantly post low-quality content. I have been attempting to fight this for years and it has been a slow losing battle. One idea I had recently is what if reputation was a metric calculated as “Likes” divided by “Posts”. Gamification has a limited impact but at this point, it is the only idea I have.

I think the question is really how you are going to run your forum. My personal politics are "distinct" but I am fully aware that if I talk about my politics in my forum, I will alienate a portion of my audience. Because my forum is not about politics, it is loose loose for me to talk about my political views. In other words, my goal is to keep my audience as large as possible and the interjection of any politics is contrary to that goal. Now if you found my Twitter feed, you would find my full embrace of free speech.

I am all about free speech but I absolutely disallow ugly or political speech in my forum. I run a sports community so there is no value to the divisive speech that is not on topic. If your members are fighting about something off topic is not valuable to your community. After years of being consistent about it, I hardly ever see a Trump or Biden reference.

So I guess I am looking for a developer. Does anyone have recommendations?

@dismalbliss You have sent me down a couple of good rabbit holes and I appreciate it so much. I did not understand about the video player, forum posts that are only visible to the user-&- admin or that I could change settings to add videos to the gallery. You have given me a lot of good ideas. @JoelR I have not looked at clubs yet but I will next. It is looking more and more like this idea is not rocket science. It is much simpler than what you have above. Not including the payment component. The process is only => student uploads video file & then coach gives comment. That is it. In my mind the hard parts or custom parts are Payment and generating each individual lesson space ( private gallery or message or forum post). If the final result looked like the below image I would be thrilled.

Just to be clear I am not talking about a fancy video editing tool. The coach reviews the uploaded video and responds via text.

Does the current IPS framework contain the basic tools needed for a video coaching tool? Thinking about the existing code behind the ticketing system ( to be removed in v5 ), Downloads, gallery, commerce, and other components. Rough draft of Idea: User pays for a video coaching lesson via the Commerce component. User uploads video file from phone using “downloads” component. File is private between user and coach or administrator. Is there an option for an uploaded file to be private between user and admin or private between user and a specific second user ( coach )? Can this file be associated with a payment? (Perfect world) video file would be automatically embedded in a local player – I am under the impression that this is currently not a simple task so the admin would have to manually move video to a non-public youtube account. (Perfect world) the system creates a “ticket” that would be a private conversation between the user and the coach with the embedded video. Realistically admin could create a conversation (a PM?) with the video link and allow the coach and user to converse. I do not think this needs to be complex or overly slick but from the user's or coaches perspective, it cannot be cumbersome or confusing. Ideas?