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No new posts Samting new, samting now!
Posted by: Support on Sun May 24, 2009 2:59 pm

We recently launched a new experimental site for "real time search" which is the latest buzzword (or phrase) and everyone is jumping on that bandwagon so naturally we too had to get a piece of that action! Wink

Actually boardtracker has been doing near real time indexing & search (and "persistent search") of forum posts for years already coz we're so cool.. Cool

Anyway, our new toy is at samting.com and includes data from forums, twitter, blogs, feeds, friendfeed etc. Like Internet Mood Report, Samting also uses the BTv2 api as well as others and is an example of what can be built to pass the time on a slow day.. Very Happy
Comments (0) | Views 630 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Obama on the Boardscape
Posted by: Support on Wed Jan 21, 2009 4:25 pm

So the big day finally arrived, the Obama inauguration is done and he is now president. Naturally it is a hot topic on the internet and there's a whole lot of chatter going on so we did a quick check to see just how much obama natter there has been on the forums over the last 24 hours.

So as of 3pm GMT on January 21st..

Obama posts account for 4.6% of all english language posts on the boardscape in the last 24 hours.

In addition non-english obama posts on forums account for 1.2% of all non-english posts - however this only includes posts that actually use the english spelling of 'obama' so things like arabic, hebrew & chinese posts will be under-represented in this case.

As the world wakes up to the first full day of the Obama reign it will be interesting to see if the discussion increases or rapidly fades away.. we will check the stats again tomorrow and over the next few days to find out..

All the data used is from posts indexed in BoardTracker v2 .

Cool
Comments (3) | Views 3418 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Internet Mood Report
Posted by: Support on Tue Sep 23, 2008 1:28 pm

Just a quick post to announce a new site we just opened..

Internet Mood Report Very Happy
http://www.internetmoodreport.com

Shows the mood of users and sites, for example here's twitter.

It's just a bit of fun but also a showcase for what can be built using our BTv2 API which will be available soon (or now if anyone specifically requests it but it is currently undocumented).
Comments (2) | Views 4027 | Topic Tags:


No new posts ICWSM 2008 - Seattle
Posted by: Administrator on Sun Mar 30, 2008 3:17 am

Tomorrow starts the ICWSM 2008 conference (http://www.icwsm.org), this year in Seattle. So far, not as sunny as Colorado of last year, but there in an undeniable charm to a city in snow.
The first day of the conference will begin in the late afternoon, with two tutorial sessions:
1. Subjectivity and Sentiment Analysis, by Jan Wiebe: about the methods for analysis of data (text) for subjective detection, measurement and analysis, allowing extraction of opinions and attitudes from textual content. With respect to the Boardscape, there is very little research done so far in detecting fluctuation of public opinion across forums. How do we define subjectivity in forums? How do we detect it? Is the subjective "lexicon" in forums different than other social spaces such as the blogosphere or opinion sites?

As for the propagation of opinion-forming information between forums, this is where the second session fits..
2. Graph Mining Techniques for Social Media Analysis by Mary McGlohon and Christos Faloutsos: How do social structures form within a community? How do we measure and map it? How do we analyze trends, information and influence propagation? This is especially interesting for forums, to both try to identify social structures within a given forum, as well as social indirect relations between separate forums.

As we plan to open BoardTracker API to researchers, it would be interesting to see more academic research focusing on message boards.
Comments (0) | Views 6077 | Topic Tags:


No new posts The NEW BoardTracker is here!...
Posted by: Administrator on Wed Sep 05, 2007 8:25 pm

I know.. we said that repeatedly in the past, but here it comes.. BoardTracker Version 2 is HERE. Granted, in beta, but public beta.

So here is the story...

We are launching the new BoardTracker now under a separate subdomain.. http://v2.boardtracker.com/
We keep the older version under www, until version 2 is ready to fully replace the existing one. Once that happens, v2 will change to www and the old system will be fully transferred to the new one, accounts, settings, the works..

When will that happen?
In the coming days certain milestones should be met, each such milestone will get us closer to the official launch. Note that during that time, both systems will be working.
While at it, new boards will be added to the new system and both the tag and search mods will be running from both systems. Note that if you have a mod installed, you do not need to do anything right away. You 'could' shift to v2 in the meantime, but we advise to simple wait patiently until the official shift.

Why not shift systems now? Why??
The new version of BoardTracker is several magnitudes bigger and more complex that the existing system. This causes several issues during the transition. Those issues both require us to carefully shift the system as well as cause certain problems and limitations while the shift occurs.

Limitations? Such as?
Slowness, missing features, partial coverage of data.
All those will be dealt with in the coming days. As days pass, so will the slowness, lack of full coverage and missing features.

So what are the milestones? When do we get to see the new version replacing the old one?
1. Coverage: By the end of this month (probably within 15 days), recent data should start showing on the index. While now we the index is about 20 days behind, the system is heavily indexing (at a rate of about 7 million posts a day). As time passes the gap will be closed. Also, as time passes, new boards will start showing in the search. Note that many of those boards are already in the system, but not yet showing in the search.
(As was said before, the new system will be working during this time, but the coverage will be partial until it finishes catching up).

2. Slowness: The new system will be dog slow (and in this case we don't mean cute little puppy kind of slow, but simply bad kind of dog slow. Both search and browse (see next milestone..) will be slow but will catch up in speed as time passes. As part of the change, we are in a process of setting up the backbone/infrastructure of the new system. We expect to see the first change in speed in about 8 days and the final and more significant change in speed before the end of the month (hopefully around the 28th).

3. Features: Certain feature...
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No new posts Forumeter - what's hot on the boardscape
Posted by: Support on Wed Mar 14, 2007 6:55 am

Want to know what the hottest video or news on the boards is today? Well check out forumeter.com to see right now!

Forumeter is a site we built recently which shows the most popular videos from a number of sites such as youtube, metacafe, myspace video, google video and more. Popularity is based on the number of forum disussions about those vids and you will see below each vid on forumeter links back to the forum threads where they are discussed so you can join in the conversation!

Along with video, forumeter also tracks news (bbc, cnn), blogs (techcrunch, lifehacker, mashable, boing boing etc) and even products (newegg) and we'll be adding more sources in the future.

All the items in forumeter are searchable and many are also tagged as you can see from the tagclouds so you can search or browse by tags.

Next to each item you can see thumbs for 'related vids' so you will hopefully discover more cool vids to view as you browse around the site

It's still a work in progress but we hope you like it so far.

Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 7807 | Topic Tags:


No new posts International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media
Posted by: Administrator on Thu Feb 01, 2007 2:53 pm

In March 26-28, 2007, a conference about weblogs and social media will take place in Colorado. The conference is named "International Conference on Weblogs and Social Media"
While weblogs, seem to get a prime place in the conference name, we will be there to remind people that the main player in social media was always, and still is, the Boardscape Smile

A little about the conference from the official conference site:
Quote:

Recent years have seen a flourishing of social media - the promise of the WWW coming to fruition. Across the world, individuals can share opinions, experiences and expertise at the push of a button. There has been a fundamental shift thanks to significant advances in the ease of publishing content. Creating web content was for years the domain of tech-savvy people; now the barrier has been torn down.

Perhaps the most visible among the successes of social media in recent years is the blogosphere. Tens of thousands of new blogs are created every day; blog content is becoming ubiquitous, surfacing in news portals, search results and corporate public relations. Even those who are unaware of the blogosphere are still influenced by its content. Although blogs are highly visible currently, other forms of conversational spaces continue to flourish, especially message boards, mailing lists, review sites and Usenet.

Social media covers all forms of sharing: from photos, to videos, to recommendations. In the past few years, many examples of social media have become hugely successful. Flickr is a premier photo sharing site; del.icio.us has become a touchstone for sharing recommendations of websites; Web 2.0 applications in general abound with newcomers in the social media space.

One of the fascinating aspects of social media has been the drive from within to study the ecology as it evolves. People act at once as creators, observers and influencers of the space in which they participate. At the same time, businesses are quickly grasping the potential benefit to attending to the new space of social media. Monitoring the aggregate trends and opinions revealed by social media provides valuable insight to a number of business applications: marketing intelligence, competitive intelligence.


The conference is sure to be an interesting one....
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No new posts Techcrunch now with forums!
Posted by: Support on Fri Jan 05, 2007 7:28 am

Big news on the boardscape AND the blogosphere today as one of the most popular bloggers, Mike Arrington of Techcrunch, has moved into forums now also with the launch of CrunchForums!

It will be interesting to see if other top bloggers follow him to the boards. Either way it is likely to bring more attention to the vast but relatively underhyped boardscape which is good news.

Of course we will be adding CrunchForums to BoardTracker soon. Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 6328 | Topic Tags:


No new posts So what is next from BoardTracker?
Posted by: Support on Sat Dec 02, 2006 8:37 am

As always BoardTracker koalas are hard at work finding the latest threads from the greatest boards in the boardscape and providing an advanced forum search function - both here on boardtracker.com and also through our forum search syndication system powering search on many of the biggest boards out there including boards.ie, bimmerforums.com, disboards.com and many more.

In fact BoardTracker is still the only viable way to search myspace forums despite the just launched 'powered by google' search on myspace! Wink

However, despite BT being soo cool already, its about to get a whole lot better! We're currently working on some major upgrades which will be revealed soon and ensure boardtracker remains at the cutting edge of forum search.

If you submitted a board and its not listed yet dont worry - once we get this upgrade out there we will index all the pending board submissions and provide an even better system for board admins and users to search the boards.

Stay tuned. Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 6357 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Web2con is over... some impressions
Posted by: Administrator on Tue Nov 14, 2006 7:03 am

The Web2.0 conference/summit is over and the LaunchPad event was great.
We have launched Klostu.com and are VERY excited about things to come.
In the coming weeks we will roll out the first installations of Klostu with few selected boards and hopefully by January 1st will open it to the wider Boardscape. Stay tuned for news on that..

The conference was good and the exposure we got for the Boardscape is something we are very happy with. With the coming launch of Klostu we are strongly focused on bringing boards and forums to the throne they deserve to sit on. Strangely enough, blogs still get so much attention even though they are simply 5% of what is referred to as "consumer generated media". While very useful and valuable (at least a certain chunk of blogs out there), blogs are not proper for everything and there is a line where blogs end and forums start.. And we want to bring as much of the spotlight there. With the launch of Klostu we want to focus the spotlight on the social supremacy of boards, as a community and networking platform.

We were quite (un)surprised to notice that we were the only players in the Boardscape. That being said, we have seen several interesting players in the social field:

    Esnips.com, although not a message board system, is focusing some of its attention on communities within their system. It should be interesting to see how their system develops in that regard.

    Sphere (granted, a blog system) has rolled out an interesting system to bring the content of blogs to "other" places.. basically allowing sites to "tie" articles/opinions/content from the wider web. We think this is a pretty interesting concept and we would like to harness the power and content of the Boardscape to the same wagon. It is simply priceless to be able to "publish" content on websites in that matter. Kudos to sphere on that.

    People aggregator was one of the things which I found most interesting.. With the launch of Klostu.com, we want to allow mobility of users and to allow boards to extend their network beyond the realm of the immediate border of the board. It is our most fundamental belief that this will boost the social element of boards beyond any expectations. What we learned is that PeopleAggregator is designing their system to basically allow the same mobility in their own network, even if in a different manner... allowing members of communities based on their technology to be mobile beyond the borders of the immediate community. I think this is a brilliant concept and I am glad we are not alone in the belief that this is a key factor in the success of an online community. Kudos for Marc Canter on that one.


One last meeting I want to mention was with a person named Stowe Boyd (/Message , [url=http://www.bluewhalelabs.com]BlueWhaleLabs[/u...
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No new posts Web 2.0 Conference Launchpad - we're in!
Posted by: Support on Thu Oct 05, 2006 10:20 am

It's official - we have been selected as one of only 13 companies, from over 200 applicants, to appear in the launchpad event at the influential Web 2.0 Conference in San Francisco on November 7th, 2006!

We'll finally be unveiling our super cool new product for the boardscape - klostu.com. We have been feverishly toiling away on klostu for a long time now and we're really looking forward to launching at the web2.0 conference which should help bring lots of attention and hype to the world of message boards! Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 6742 | Topic Tags:


No new posts The 'discussion' in discussion forums
Posted by: Administrator on Tue Sep 12, 2006 10:19 pm

Message boards are long recognized as a place where most of the discussion between people on the web takes place. But how much discussion takes place in the Boardscape? and what are its characteristics?

The first part of a series of articles will explore exactly that aspect of the Boardscape.


While boards vary greatly in most characteristics, be it number of members in the board, age, gender, theme/topic of the board, language, design and even the board software, there are interesting aspects of the discussion on boards that arise from the total of all of the discussions generated in them.

One key factor for a discussion is it's "length". How many exchanges are made in a thread? While a single person starts a thread in a forum, others in the forum can reply to that thread (in most cases). Some threads get no reply, because it calls for no reply or there is no need for one (some board announcements for example), some are looking for information that others can not provide, topic is locked and other reasons. Some threads however generate hundreds or thousands of replies. There are even extreme cases where the number of replies exceed 100,000. Again, a thread with more than 100,000 replies by members of the forum.



The following chart is a histogram of the number of threads with specific replies.
As you can see, the biggest group is the threads without replies. However, it is about 13% of the threads. This means that over 85% of the threads on boards get at least one reply. It can be stated then that boards are not a lonely place like other internet mediums. To emphasize that consider the following fact.. a thread in the Boardscape receives on average about 16 replies.

about 2.5% of the threads get between 51-100 replies, less than 1% between 101-200 and only less than 0.5% receive more than 200 replies.



The following chart illustrates the accumuated number of threads with at least X amount of replies.

As you can see, over 80% of the threads receive up to 15 replies, over 90% of the threads receive up to 26 replies and over 99% receive up to 50 replies. Again, the percentage reaches almost 99.5% at about 175 replies which means that 0.5% of the threads out there receive more than 175 replies. While not a very high number, it does mean that in an average board, one in two hundred threads receive about 200 replies or more.



We should take into consideration though, that the most "value" found in threads is more likely to be found in the shorter threads and towards the beginning of them. The format of board conversation, be it an informative thread (where most of the value is often in the first post) or a question and answer session where most of the value is in the question and the first 10 or 20 answers (granted ...
Comments (0) | Views 8671 | Topic Tags:


No new posts New - Related Tags
Posted by: Support on Mon Sep 04, 2006 8:08 am

We've added a handy new 'related tags' feature recently..

Try a search on boardtracker (tag search or regular search) and you will see on the right column a tag cloud showing related tags. For example click this..

http://www.boardtracker.com/tag/music

You can see in the tag cloud there things like itunes, rock, radio, mp3 etc.

Nifty eh? Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 6519 | Topic Tags:


No new posts [ Poll ] Choose a logo for new community forum based service..
Posted by: Support on Thu Aug 17, 2006 1:00 pm

We are about to launch a new web service that will connect ALL members in all board communities and will encourage people to engage in conversation and friendships and would greatly appreciate your input on this, since the logo and the service is, after all, for you.. Smile

We want our logo to reflect the spirit of the site: A fresh and friendly platform for enabling individuals to better form and maintain online communities revolving around all the message boards out there.

So in the spirit of a new and fresh Intenet community based service, which of the three logos do you like best?

Feel free to also include your thoughts and ideas about your favorite logo.

Final touches and color changes may be applied.

Note: you need to login (or signup - its free!) before you can vote.

...
Comments (2) | Views 8333 | Topic Tags:


No new posts BoardTracker Search Mod v2 released!
Posted by: Support on Sun Aug 13, 2006 6:41 pm

We're pleased to announce the release of version 2 of our super cool integrated forum search mod for boards! Cool

Currently it is available for vbulletin versions 3.5 and 3.6 and will soon also be available for IPB and phpBB.

New features in version 2 include..

Search thread by username
Search in specific forums (set your board id in the control panel for this to work)
Search in related forums (as above)
Search by boardtracker category
Global search option
Block or restrict the built in search to specific usergroups
More integration with vb search links (such as from member profile)
More widgets in the control panel to play with! Wink

Check out our mods page for the latest download links..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/5/


More good stuff coming soon.. Very Happy...
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No new posts Israel & Hizbollah battle while the people talk - war2.0
Posted by: Support on Fri Jul 21, 2006 11:02 am

As war rages in lebanon and northern israel between hizbollah and the israeli army, on the web another campaign is fought.. that of the common people on both sides of the border (and further afield) who are able to talk, in a previously unprecendented way, with each other on the boards and blogs, sharing experiences under fire, fighting a war of words and perhaps also attempting to understand each other despite (or perhaps because of) the suffering that war brings. Is this "War2.0" ?

We've collected a few links to interesting discussions on boards and blogs where you can keep up with whats going on in the region from the perspective of the people whose lives are directly affected..

This topic on flyertalk focuses mostly on two people.. Dovster and BEYflyer. Dovster is an israeli living on a kibbutz close to the lebanese border and BEYflyer is lebanese and living in Beirut. They give their accounts of events as they happen on the ground and its a very interesting read which so far covers 32 pages and over 1200 posts!

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/showthread.php?t=563147


The 'Lebanese Political Forum' on Lebanese-Forces.org board contains many hot topics related to the current situation and the people taking part in the discussions there now consist of lebanese (including christian and muslim), israeli, palestinian and others.

The conversations show the entire range of feelings experienced by the people there from anger and hate to understanding and criticism of all parties involved and provides a unique insight into the issues and how people in the region view them as well as being a source on news events as they happen..

http://www.lebanese-forces.org/vbullet/forumdisplay.php?f=18

TimeBomb2000 covers just about all the major global events and of course many of the topics are about the current conflict. Most of the participants are in the US but they scour the worlds news sources, collecting many interesting articles (a mix of news, views and some rumour) which are then posted neatly organized into relevant topics so its a good way to keep up with whats going on, at least according to the various commentators whose articles are posted..

http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/forumdisplay.php?f=9

The following blogs are by lebanese, some who are (or were) in Beirut when the conflict began. They provide interesting news and views and I recommend reading them starting from the posts made at the beginning of the war to follow the events in chronological order..

http://lebanesebloggers.blogspot.com/
http://lebop.blogspot.com/

And here are some blogs by israelis..

http://ontheface.blogware.com/
http://olehgirl.blogspot.com/
http://www.onejerusalem.com/

There are thousands more discussions going on right now on the boards and blogs and to keep up with them you can save the following links..

On the boards..
htt...
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No new posts klostu.com - its coming soon..
Posted by: Support on Wed Jun 21, 2006 1:41 pm

We've been working on this for several months now and its getting very close to being ready for public launch.. its going to be HUGE! Shocked

Submit the form to be notified about updates or to become a beta tester soon..

http://www.klostu.com/

Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 6923 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Has Your Board Got Search?
Posted by: Support on Fri May 26, 2006 11:22 am

Checkout the growing list of great boards now running our board search plugin..

http://boards.ie/vbulletin/searchbt.php
http://forum.rpg.net/search.php
http://forums.bimmerforums.com/forum/searchbt.php
http://www.beasttoast.com/forum/searchbt.php
http://yeuamnhac.com/music/searchbt.php
http://forum.oioplus.com/searchbt.php
http://hostingforum.ca/searchbt.php
http://www.wargamehome.com/Forum/searchbt.php
http://www.vietsharing.com/searchbt.php
http://www.unofficialblue.com/searchbt.php
http://digitalet.net/forum/searchbt.php
http://www.slide-show.net/forum/searchbt.php
http://www.php2net.com/forum/searchbt.php
http://forums.xbox-scene.com/index.php?act=SearchBT
http://www.guildwarsguru.com/forum/searchbt.php
http://www.disboards.com/searchbt.php

Our search mod takes all the processing load away from your servers and delivers quality results to your users fully integrated with your board!

Visit our mods page for download links for various board types..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/5

If you installed the search mod be sure to let us know so we can add your board to this list.

Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 7503 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Persistent Search with BoardTracker
Posted by: Support on Sat May 06, 2006 10:42 am

"Persistent Search" seems to be getting some attention recently in the blogosphere and the press so what exactly is it?

Well basically persistent search is when you define search terms and then sit back and wait to be notified anytime an article is posted anywhere that mentions that term. Notifications can be in various forms such as RSS feeds, email or IM alerts, custom results pages which dynamically update etc.

"But wait", I hear you say "Isn't that what BoardTracker does?"

Thats right, it is exactly what BoardTracker does and always has done right from day one! With boardtracker you define a range of keywords and phrases to track and the system constantly scans for mentions of any of those terms and will notify you by email or instant message and your alerts will be added to your private alerts page so you can always see all those important results listed in one place. You can also create searches and generate any number of custom rss feeds to add to your favourite rss reader and the feeds will of course update when new topics match that term.

A key issue with persistent search is that it must be timely. You could easily setup an alert on Google or Yahoo to notify you of new pages matching your search terms but these are not very useful since neither of those (or any of GYMA) are spidering and indexing fresh content in near realtime. They simply spider everything they find whenever they find it and will maybe revisit pages/sites again sometimes to check for updates in a few weeks or months or maybe not at all. They may come across new pages or they may only find pages made years ago. Clearly this is not persistent search, it is merely 'search' with 'alerts' tacked on.

A potential problem with persistent search, as with any search, is getting too much noise or results that are not relevant or important. An example of this could be if you track the term "breaking news" which will alert you of important breaking news but often will be unimportant announcements or irrelevant posts. BoardTracker helps with this by providing a categorized system - perhaps you only want to know about "breaking news" in the mobile phone industry for example, so you simply select that category when defining your alerts terms. Imagine tracking the term "apple" on all data sources - do you want alerts about fruit or about computers? Define your alerts term to work on the computers category and you wont be hearing so much about fruit! Very Happy

BoardTracker has developed a unique system to scan in a 'smart' way all the message boards and forums in the index, constantly checking for new topics and sending alerts to our users in whatever f...
Comments (0) | Views 6505 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Integrated BoardTracker search on all the boards and forums!
Posted by: Support on Tue May 02, 2006 3:11 pm

A common problem message board admins have, no matter which software they use, is providing a quality search engine for their users without killing their servers in the process. Searching large amounts of data is a complex and resource hungry process and when a board starts to gain in popularity it can very quickly suffer from load problems thereby becoming a victim of its own success.

There have been various methods used by board admins to minimize the impact of this ranging from disabling search entirely (a very common practice) to selective disabling based on server load or user membership groups or even relying on external google 'site search' which is simply not suited to or designed for the task of searching boards. Naturally this is not ideal and depriving users of the ability to search the forums will only hurt the community and the user experience.

Another problem aside from load issues is providing quality, relevant results which is not a trivial task and one made all the more difficult for board developers who aim to make their software run on a variety of platforms with different databases such as mysql, postgres or some other db all of which can have issues of one kind or another which often negatively impact search effectiveness and usability for for board users.

However there is now a solution to all these problems for message board search and that is to integrate BoardTracker's advanced forum search within the board itself!

BoardTracker now provides free plugins allowing board admins to easily replace the built in search system and provide a powerful, relevant and flexible search engine which fully integrates with the board. The results are displayed within the board just as they would with the internal search script and the format is fully customizable.

Various configuration options exist to allow admins to further customize the search such as the ability to expand search to include results from multiple specified boards (or even ALL boards indexed by BoardTracker! Results can be ordered by date or relevancy and can be restricted to last day, week, month, year or all time.

All this powerful search facility now available to boards is provided without placing any of the load on server resources that currently plague them. All the processing is done on BoardTracker servers which then return the search results to the board to display.

The vbulletin version is now available and you can try it out on our vb demo board here..

http://demo.boardtracker.com/vb/searchbt.php

Also here is a real world example where you can see how integrated the results are with the board and also note that the admin has implemented the multi-board search feature to return results from two boards..

http://www.beasttoast.com/forum/searchbt.php?search=luck&scope=4&order=1

In the next few days we will be releasing versions for phpbb and invision with others to ...
Comments (0) | Views 5953 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Custom Tag Clouds for Boards
Posted by: Support on Mon Apr 24, 2006 12:06 pm

Now you can add custom tag clouds to any board or forum indexed by BoardTracker - in fact you can add the tag clouds to any site or blog!

Even better, it requires no complicated modding - just a single line of javascript pasted onto any page is all you need like so..

Code:
<script type="text/javascript" language=Javascript src="http://www.boardtracker.com/cloud/js/?board=588
&items=20&smallsize=6&bigsize=20&hot=e01010&cold=4090a0&days=90&linktype=3"></script>


That code above creates the tag cloud you can see on the left column now. Just copy and paste onto your site (it should be all on one line with no breaks) and change the params to suit.

The params are very simple..

board= your board id on boardtracker which you can see on your control panel or just ask us if you are not sure. Leave it empty to generate a tag cloud for ALL boards in boardtracker.

items= the number of tags to include in the cloud.

smallsize= the font size for the smallest tags in the cloud

bigsize= the font size for the biggest tags in the cloud

hot= the color code for the 'hot' tags (for example: e01010)

cold= the color code for the 'cold' tags (for example: 4090a0)

days= how many days should be included when selecting tags for the cloud - max is 90.

linktype= specify 1, 2 or 3 - 1 and 2 are local tag links, 1 uses mod_rewrite, 3 uses boardtracker links.

You can customize even further by using CSS instead like the tagcloud on the bottom of this page. That way you don't need to specify visualization parameters in the script URI, but control the visual aspects of the cloud via the CSS file. To do that you just make a stylesheet file called tags_default.css and include the following info..


[code:1:767b2a470c].BT_TAG1 {font-size:10}
.BT_TAG1:link {color:#4090a0;}
.BT_TAG1:hover {color:#60b0c0;}

.BT_TAG2 {font-size:12}
.BT_TAG2:link {color:#607683;}
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.BT_TAG6:link {color:#e01010;}...
Comments (9) | Views 18596 | Topic Tags:


No new posts TAG, you're it!
Posted by: Support on Thu Apr 20, 2006 7:35 pm

Boards are (more) cool again now with added web2.0 goodies - of course boards were always cool but some bloggers are just in denial.. (no not the river in egypt) Wink

Check out some of these great boards now running the boardtracker topic tagging mod..

http://www.modaco.com/forums.html
http://www.diggleblop.com/forums/
http://www.runaked.com/forums/
http://www.mobiholics.net/
http://www.beasttoast.com
http://www.voipservicetalk.com/
http://www.meeciteewurkor.com/tforum/
http://www.gottalk.com/
http://www.secondpagemedia.com/confundo/
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/
http://www.vexfan.com/

and of course: http://discuss.fotopages.com

Judging by the mod download stats there are many more boards with tagging so let us know if/when you install it and we'll add you to this list!

Oh and get ready for tag clouds on the boards - its in testing now and will be released in a few days!

Cool...
Comments (1) | Views 5767 | Topic Tags:


No new posts techspose.com now in closed beta..
Posted by: Support on Mon Apr 17, 2006 7:25 am

Top secret Techspose enters private, invitation only, web2.0 beta testing.. only 'A+ listers' need apply.. Wink

So what's that all about then? The next hot ajax powered web2.0 thing?

http://www.techspose.com

Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 5490 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Instant RSS Feeds for Message Boards
Posted by: Support on Sat Apr 15, 2006 11:59 am

These days it is pretty much *essential* for every site to have an rss feed and message boards are no exception!

However in many cases creating rss feeds on forums requires installing mods which you may not want or know how to do but worry no more - boardtracker saves the day again.. Wink

BoardTracker provides searchable rss feeds and when that is combined with the 'site search' feature you can now very easily create your own custom, board specific rss feeds.

All you need to do is use boardtracker search and enter 'site:yourdomain.com' in the search box then look at the RSS icon at the bottom of the results and copy that link - that's your very own custom rss feed! Just add that link to the footer on your board using whatever rss icon you prefer.

Here's some examples for this board..

site:boardtracker.com

At the bottom of that results page the orange RSS icon links to this rss feed

You can even customize it further by adding a search term like so..

site:boardtracker.com+tagging

Which creates this rss feed.

Now you can create as many custom rss feeds for your board as you want and all without installing any tricky mods - just paste some html onto any page and its done! Very Happy...
Comments (0) | Views 6067 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Tagging for message boards
Posted by: Support on Tue Apr 11, 2006 8:01 am

Tagging is not just for bloggers anymore now that it is possible to tag threads on message boards and forums using BoardTracker tagging mods!

We now have mods available for phpbb, vbulletin and invision with more on the way so now its easy for boards to provide a tagging system for their users and build a folksonomy both locally on individual boards and globally since all tags are indexed in boardtracker and combine to a really useful community resource.

Once created, topic tags link to tag search using boardtracker resources and can be configured to return results from a single board, all boards or a specified group of boards to allow for creation of 'tag rings' to trade traffic.

Visit the following links to download the appropriate mod for your board software..

http://mods.invisionize.com/db/index.php?f=6314
http://www.vbulletin.org/forum/showthread.php?t=111887
http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=359774

Following on from this, boards will also be able to have nifty tag clouds based on their topic tag data.

Now the ever popular message board can also ride the web2.0 wave! Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 6048 | Topic Tags:


No new posts The wonderful world of storage consolidation
Posted by: Support on Thu Apr 06, 2006 5:29 pm

The other day we attended a conference on 'storage consolidation' where speakers from companies like Intel, LSI and Nexsan told us how wonderful their latest products are..

It was quite interesting, got some useful info.. and even better - got a free lunch! (in fact I probably crammed at least 2 lunches on the same plate but don't tell them that) Smile

Anyway, did you know Intel was in the storage business? I didn't but it seems they are and they have some nifty products..

For example.. the Intel Entry Storage System SS4000-E which is not the catchiest name but its a nice little storage system aimed at home or small office use. Uses up to 4 SATA disks giving a max of 2TB which is pretty good and is designed to be simple to setup and use and allows data sharing with computers running just about any type of OS including windows, linux and os/x. Overall a very handy little system to store your divx collection that you honestly didn't download from the net.. Wink

Now for heavy duty storage requirements Intel has the Intel Storage System SSR212MA - just rolls off the tongue doesn't it? Wink

Anyway, as I said this one is for big storage. Its a SAN storage system using iSCSI and offers grid functionality so you can just plugin extra servers and the usable storage just grows automatically using some kind of voodoo.. sounds cool!

Again these use SATA drives, up to 12 which gives a total of 6TB storage on each server. With the grid/clustering feature you can in theory scale the storage to hundreds of TB's. It has all the usual storage functions like snapshots and also asynchronous remote copying which sounds neat. They say costs are in the region of $2 - $5 per Gig which is not too shabby.

Moving swiftly on.. there was a guy from LSI rattling on about raid 6 and some new features available with a new firmware which is coming soon (or maybe its out now) to allow existing cards to support those. We use LSI's in our storage system for fotopages so this could be useful.

Nexsan have some very nice storage systems including SATABlade, SATABoy and SATABeast - these guys could teach Intel a thing or two about product naming! Wink

The SATABlade is a neat 1U system with with 8 hot swappable SATA drives giving a total storage of 4TB which is impressive for a 1U server.

The SATABoy is a 3U server supporting 14 sata drives so thats 7TB storage with 500G drives.. quite respectable.

Now we come to the SATABeast - this thing is aptly named! Its a 4U server with a whopping 42 SATA drives!!! Shocked

It also claims over 700MB/s sustained throughput, supports raid 0, 1, 3, 5 and 10 and as with the other nexsan servers it has dual 2GB fibre channel ports.
...
Comments (0) | Views 5689 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Custom search engine for your board or site!
Posted by: Support on Wed Apr 05, 2006 7:31 pm

Now you can add a handy customized search to your board, or in fact any site, using boardtracker search engine.

Search results will show your logo and users can search just your own board or do a global board search.

Even better though you can include your own google adsense id so you make money from highly targeted ads displayed around the results!

Here is how it looks:


Here's an example search customized for fotopages.

All you need to do is paste some simple html code on any page which will show a search box and then your visitors can access a great search engine directly from your site and you make money if they click any of the google ads.

Here's the html code used for the fotopages search..

Code:
<FORM ID=SEARCH_FORM_THREAD NAME=SEARCH_FORM_THREAD ACTION="http://www.boardtracker.com/search_custom/">
<TABLE CELLSPACING=0 CELLPADDING=0>
    <TR>
        <TD ROWSPAN=2 ALIGN=LEFT><IMG SRC="http://www.boardtracker.com/images/label_small.png"></TD>
        <TD ALIGN=LEFT>&nbsp;&nbsp;<INPUT NAME="search" VALUE="" STYLE="width:200px" onChange="javascript:this.value=this.value.replace(/^\s*|\s*$/g,'').replace(/\s+/g, ' ').toLowerCase();"></INPUT>&nbsp;&nbsp;<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT ID=SEARCH_FORM VALUE="Search Threads"></TD>
    </TR>
    <INPUT NAME=page VALUE="1" TYPE=HIDDEN>
    <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME=order>
    <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME=scope>
    <TR>
        <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="sitelimit" VALUE="fotopages.com"></INPUT>
        <TD ALIGN=LEFT>&nbsp;&nbsp;<FONT SIZE=-1><INPUT TYPE=RADIO ID="Limited" NAME="islimit" VALUE="1" checked></INPUT>fotopages.com &nbsp;&nbsp;<INPUT TYPE=RADIO ID="UnLimited" NAME="islimit" VALUE="0" ></INPUT>All boards</FONT></TD>
    </TR>
</TABLE>
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="client" VALUE="pub-1262156066908756"></INPUT>
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="channel" VALUE=""></INPUT>
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="logo" VALUE="http://www.fotopages.com/images/logo.gif"></INPUT>
<INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="css" VALUE=""></INPUT>
</FORM>


To use this on your own site just change the domain in "sitel...
Comments (0) | Views 5969 | Topic Tags:


No new posts New look for boardtracker
Posted by: Support on Sat Apr 01, 2006 1:48 pm

Check out the new look on boardtracker index page.

I think you will agree its a winner! Cool
















For any late arrivals you can see it here also.

Happy April Fools Day! Very Happy...
Comments (0) | Views 5691 | Topic Tags:


No new posts BoardTracker now in Gada.be
Posted by: Support on Fri Mar 31, 2006 11:42 am

Gada.be is a really cool metasearch service which pulls results from loads of sources such as technorati, digg, msn and many many more. But what's even cooler is that it now includes.. boardtracker! Very Happy

Gada.be is made by Chris Pirillo of TechTV fame. Check out his blog....
Comments (0) | Views 5556 | Topic Tags:


No new posts How to build traffic to your board - Tag it!
Posted by: Support on Wed Mar 29, 2006 6:39 pm

Want to get some fresh targeted traffic to your message board?

Board owners/admins can tap into a great new source of targeted traffic and get cool web2.0 features for your forums.. just install our topic tagging mod and let your users tag threads as they create them or you can tag threads already indexed simply by using the 'thread tools' link next to each thread in BoardTracker search results.

Once you have tags on your board you can also have tag clouds! You can see a tag cloud on our index page now which shows hot topics across the whole system - you can place clouds like this on your board and you can even configure it to show only tagged threads from your board.

Tags and tagclouds are great features to help your users find related topics or the hottest threads of the moment. Also when your tagged threads are 'hot' they can appear in the tag cloud on our index page plus on all tag clouds showing on all other boards using the system (except that choose to only show their own tag data in the clouds).

So if you are not tagging yet, your board AND your users are missing out - its time to hop aboard the web2.0 juggernaut! Very Happy...
Comments (0) | Views 6178 | Topic Tags:


No new posts BoardTracker Funky Trend Graphs
Posted by: Support on Thu Mar 23, 2006 1:42 pm

Hot on the heals of our tag clouds we now have yet another cool new feature on BoardTracker.. trend graphs!

Here's an example showing the effect on board discussions of the cyclone in australia..



Google Finance appears on the net..



Microsoft (and Scoble?) hyping Origami..



The Oscars..



The movie V for Vendetta is a hot topic..



Just small samples of what we can do but pretty neat eh? You can also see the latest graph on our index page....
Comments (0) | Views 6118 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Tag clouds are here
Posted by: Administrator on Tue Mar 21, 2006 5:42 pm

Following what we consider a very successful upgrade of our system we are very excited to introduce the first ever message board related tag cloud. If you haven't seen it yet, check out the index page on http://www.boardtracker.com

Tag clouds are a way to display the hottest threads of the moment in realtime, constantly updating and are of course very web2.0 Wink

As a board owner/admin you can soon also display tag clouds on your forums which can be configured to display the hottest topics only from your board(s) or from the global 'boardscape' giving your members and visitors a great way to see whats going on and to instantly find and join in those discussions.

Also when your board has tagged threads those topics will appear in tag clouds on boardtracker index page as well as other pages and on any other board or site displaying boardtracker tagclouds which will bring in loads of fresh and targeted traffic.

But you don't have to be a board admin to display boardtracker tag clouds - any site or blog or board can display our customizable clouds and provide your visitors with the latest and hottest topics of discussion on the net.

We are sure you will agree that not only are boardtracker tagclouds the funkiest tag clouds to be found anywhere but they will also help boards and forums ride the web 2.0 wave and to maintain and extend their leading role in the dynamic field of consumer generated media (CGM).

Let us know what you think and if you have any thoughts on how we can improve boardtracker we'd love to hear! Smile...
Comments (0) | Views 7947 | Topic Tags:


No new posts We're Back!
Posted by: Support on Thu Mar 16, 2006 1:58 am

We just about completed the big move to a new datacenter.. that was fun! Wink

While moving we also installed lots of new hardware - servers, switches, routers and various other cool machines with flashing lights and go faster stripes.

We still have a few little things to finish off, some tweaks here and there but we're now pretty much ready to start ramping up the spidering and get a bunch of new stuff launched. Its onward and upward for BoardTracker!


Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 5850 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Origami Ultramobile TabletPC - I want one!
Posted by: Support on Thu Mar 09, 2006 10:15 am

I just watched the Channel 9 video about the funky new portable tablet PC from Microsoft and I have to say.. I WANT ONE!!

I actually run Linux on my desktop and on my old Toshiba laptop and I have a Zaurus PDA thingy which also runs Linux but Origami could just be cool enough and with a price just about right enough to make me turn (for mobile use at least) to 'the dark side'.. Embarassed

The only drawback I can see is.. that its not in the shops NOW! Sad

Read what people are saying about Origami on the boards here..

http://www.boardtracker.com/search/?search=origami...
Comments (0) | Views 5671 | Topic Tags:


No new posts New Tagging Tool on BoardTracker
Posted by: Support on Mon Mar 06, 2006 8:19 am

Check out the nifty new thread tagging tool on BoardTracker now! Cool

Just browse or search and click the [thread tools] link next to any thread which will open the tools options including tagging. You can enter tags there and they will instantly appear below the thread (funky ajax!) and can then be used to do tag seaches for example..

http://www.boardtracker.com/tag/boardtracker

Even better, on boardtracker you can do tag searches on a single board, a selection of boards or all boards and you can tag search by category for example you could search for the tag 'apple' on the 'Computers & Internet' category to get even more relevant results!

The new search functions will be released shortly so you can try them out soon but have a go at tagging threads now - just need to login (signup free if you are not yet a member) and then all the thread tools will be available for you to use.

So now you can add tags to board threads from both sides - on the board when a thread is created and on boardtracker itself at any time after.

More tag related (and other) features are also on the way.. how cool is BoardTracker?! Very Happy...
Comments (0) | Views 6288 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Are blogs morphing into forums?
Posted by: Support on Sun Mar 05, 2006 12:21 pm

How do you like our new blog?

Of course its really a regular forum on phpbb which we modded slightly to give it more of a 'traditional' blog appearance (we'll release it as a packaged up 'blog mod' soon) but functionally its using the same old forum configs and permissions that have always existed.

Which brings me to the question: are blogs morphing into forums?

Looking at blogs they seem to have gone from a standalone site where the owner would just talk about whatever they want, a 'personal pulpit' in effect. But then comments were added to the blog allowing for a certain amount of conversation albeit it in a relatively basic format..

Then came comment notifications so you can get an email if someone comments on a blog post where you also commented..

Blog networks also started appearing where instead of a blog being a place for a single person to write stuff, there are now many people writing blog entries. Still limited to specific people but getting closer to a forum/message board type thing.

What forum type feature will be bolted on to blogs next? What blog type feature will be bolted on to forums? Will Blogs 3.0 = Forums 2.0?

The difference I think between blogs and forums lies in the community aspect of forums which is mostly lacking in blogs. In a blog the focus is almost entirely on the initial entry by the blog owner, comments are incidental and I would guess in many cases rarely even read. It could be said that the 'blogosphere' as a whole can be seen as a community in itself but it is a very loose and fractured community and eventually breaks down to the inidividual blogger - a community of one.

In a forum a thread can be posted by anyone in the community and will result in a discussion between members of that community - the focus is more on the entire discussion not just the first post.

In the 'real world' you could equate a forum thread with for example a round table discussion, a group of friends sat together in the pub, a self help group meetup, or an open meeting at work perhaps. Whereas a blog entry is more like a speech, a single person stands up at the front and says his/her piece to the crowd who may or may not have the opportunity to make some comment at the end, but either way nobody goes to a speech to listen to other peoples comments at the end, they go to hear the speech itself. For example this excellent speech at Google by Seth Godin.

The value in forums is in the community involvement. For example say you are a Honda enthusiast, you could seek out Honda related blogs and no doubt there are many good blogs each with their own unique viewpoint. Or you could seek out Honda forums (and of course there a...
Comments (0) | Views 6411 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Slashdot Tagging - news for (web 2.0) nerds!
Posted by: Support on Thu Mar 02, 2006 1:21 pm

Today I noticed that the ever popular slashdot has just implemented article tags which is an interesting development. Currently though tagging is only open to subscribers.

Tagging is very popular these days, particularly among bloggers, and of course BoardTracker has brought tagging to forum threads too as you can see in the 'topic tags' below. For an example of these tags displayed on boardtracker have a look here..

http://www.boardtracker.com/search/?search=site%3Aboardtracker.com

We are rolling out several new tag related features for boards soon also.. watch this space! Very Happy...
Comments (0) | Views 6340 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Instant Messaging with BT
Posted by: Support on Wed Mar 01, 2006 9:20 am

BoardTracker provides instant alerts to premium members using our own Instant Messaging system however this IM network can also be used by ALL BoardTracker members, free & premium.

You can use it to contact and chat with other BT members and board users.. to chat with your friends just tell them to register for a free BoardTracker account!

All you need to use the BoardTracker IM system is any Jabber compatible IM client such as Trillian, Gaim, Miranda, Meebo or many others available for all platforms. Just set your IM client to connect to im.boardtracker.com using your normal BoardTracker login details.

How do you find other BT users to contact? Well more on that soon.. Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 5570 | Topic Tags:


No new posts 15 Million Conversations!
Posted by: Support on Fri Feb 24, 2006 11:44 am

Today BoardTracker reached 15 MILLION message threads indexed and we're growing faster by the day! Very Happy

We're busy installing lots of new hardware now in a new datacenter so we can index even more threads - we're aiming for 100 Million in the near future..

If you're not yet reading the message boards you're missing out on some great discussions and a mine of useful information not to mention great communities - try a search on BoardTracker today and you'll be hooked on the forums in no time! Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 5399 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Firefox Search Plugin
Posted by: Support on Wed Feb 22, 2006 11:32 am

Did you know you can search BoardTracker directly from your browser using the firefox plugin??

Well now you do! Wink

Its quite nifty, just go to our main page and see at the bottom there is the "Click >>HERE<< to install" link. Just click it and after install you will see the BoardTracker blue dog icon appear in the list of search engines showing in the firefox search box.

You can also read more about it on our tools page.

The even more cool thing is that you can set what it will search by logging into your BoardTracker account and going to "preferences" and then look for the "Plugin search in" option. You can set it to search All threads in boardtracker or just those appearing in the categories you have defined and which appear in "My Threads".

The search plugin works in firefox on all platforms - windows and linux - and in netscape and mozilla browsers.

Try it! Cool...
Comments (0) | Views 5403 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Fodder for the Blog with BoardTracker
Posted by: Support on Sun Feb 19, 2006 5:10 pm

So you sit down in front of your computer determined to write the next killer entry to your blog that will set the blogosphere buzzing and take you a step closer to the fabled 'A' list of bloggers.. but disaster strikes - writers block! Shocked

What do you do?

Many things can be done such as scouring google news or see whats hot in technorati now or checkout memeorandum perhaps and all of these methods may give you ideas for your next entry but at least with the last two these ideas are from blog posts that already exist and so you are a bit late to the dinner table..

All is not lost though and BoardTracker comes to the rescue (of course you knew I would say that Wink) - get your inspiration from the 'boardscape' which is a whole other world and remains largely untapped by bloggers.

There are millions of topics discussed on countless message boards every day and even though naturally there will be some crossover between the boardscape and the blogosphere there is a huge range of topics on both sides where one side 'leads' the other at one time or another. An example at the moment is brrreeeport which is a very hot topic on blogs now but barely gets a mention on boards so far and so could be used as fodder for board posts now.

You can be sure there is an enormous number of topics on boards at any time which have not yet made the jump to blogs and BoardTracker provides easy tools to help you stay informed of relevant topics.

Lets say for example your blog is about cellphones you could browse our cellphones category which is ordered by date and updates in almost real time or you could subscribe to the rss feed for that category if you prefer your data that way.

You could also use our alerts mechanism which will send you a message by Jabber Instant Message and/or Email whenever a topic matching your interests is posted on any forum we track making sure you are one of the first to know!

BoardTracker rss feeds are also available for search terms along with categories allowing you to retrieve the most relevant and up to date results possible. You can even narrow down your search to a specific message board or select group of message boards if you want!

So with BoardTracker to back you up, you will never be short of things to blog about!...
Comments (0) | Views 5522 | Topic Tags:


No new posts brrreeeport and the search engine showdown
Posted by: Support on Thu Feb 16, 2006 1:11 pm

It seems that Robert Scoble has started a storm in a teacup by inventing a word "brrreeeport" and asking everyone to blog it.

Its been interesting watching it spread around the 'blogosphere' and beyond (someone even registered brrreeeport.com!) although it hasn't yet reached the 'boardscape' until now at least.. Wink

But it has stirred up some debate about how accurate search engine results numbers really are with Google being the obvious first choice to jump on.. it apparently reported over 22k results for brrreeeport.

Scoble is not amused by search engines showing inaccurate results and even David Sifry (of Technorati) has weighed in on the topic and when dealing with small numbers of results they have a point, the numbers should be accurate, but when dealing with large numbers of results does it really matter anymore as long as they are not wildly innacurate? Do you search for the stats or the results themselves? I know some may need the stats more for marketing/biz intelligence purposes but in such a case its better to use tools designed for that task rather than the default/public search mechanism.

For one thing Google only shows the first 1000 results no matter how many it says there are, many other search engines do the same, afaik technorati shows just the first 200 results, so if the numbers are not exactly accurate how can anyone really know once you get beyond those limits? Does it even matter? After all you search to get the most relevant results and if the search engine is doing a good job there is no need to drill down so far.

Now as to why Google showed 22k results I would guess that includes some duplicates of one kind or another.. such as multiple rss/xml/whatever feeds which may be indexed along with the page itself plus all those aggregator sites showing links to all those blog posts (not to mention spam pages) and even results pages such as on technorati often appear in google.. plus there's the comments which probably all have the magic word in also and often will be on additional pages so all in all its not too impossible for google to find more results than expected. Which is not to say its good when so many may be dupes but probably most are hidden so only the most relevant, non dupes, actually show up by default.

There may also be various technical issues when pulling/counting/manipulating results from clusters and datacenters all over the place. When google has to display the number of results to a search term they show an estimate only and not an accurate number. This is true by the way, in almost all search engines case, where the amount of data indexed is vast and spread across many mirrors in a large server cluster.

Estimates are used to facilitate faster response to searches (which we all agree is an important aspect).
When google ...
Comments (0) | Views 6368 | Topic Tags:


No new posts We're Moving & Expanding!
Posted by: Support on Wed Feb 15, 2006 5:06 pm

In the next few days we'll start migrating all boardtracker and pidgintech systems over to a new and better datacenter since we have basically outgrown the existing place.

We have a load of fancy new blade servers with go faster stripes sitting in storage now which will also be installed in the new place and which will allow us to take boardtracker through the next phase of (massive!) growth.

Hopefully there will be little or no noticable downtime during the move but if things are flaky now and then you know why and don't worry - it will all be back to normal soon enough and even better than before! Very Happy...
Comments (0) | Views 5322 | Topic Tags:


No new posts New BoardTracker Board Owners Portal
Posted by: Support on Tue Feb 14, 2006 3:43 pm

Today we released our new portal for board owners and admins! Cool

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/

There you will find all sorts of essential info, links and tools to help you add your board, manage and grow your community with BoardTracker.

Probably the most important tool you can find there is the board control panel where you can view your board(s) or search for and 'claim' your boards if you have not done so already. You can then manage many aspects of how your board is indexed in BoardTracker as well as view some statistics and other info.

Another section in the portal is 'mods & extras' which is where we will tell you about various board mods/plugins we release, such as our topic tags mod, as well as other cool offers and opportunities.

Also in the portal is a fairly comprehensive FAQ which we hope will answer any questions or concerns board owners may have about BoardTracker but you can also see there various ways to contact us if you have more questions.

So, if you are a board owner or admin check out the portal to learn how to get the most from BoardTracker..

http://www.boardtracker.com/boards/...
Comments (0) | Views 5613 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Tips to Maximize Your BoardTracker Account
Posted by: Support on Mon Feb 13, 2006 6:55 pm

Here's a few tips to help you get the most from BoardTracker..

When setting up your alerts terms make sure to enclose phrases in quotes otherwise you will get alerts on each word individually which can result in lots of not very relevant alerts. Here's an example of how not to define your alerts term..

Code:
xbox games console games


Here's how you should do it for best results..

Code:
xbox "xbox games" "console games" -xbox360


This alerts term will send you alerts on any threads that mention xbox obviously, also the phrases will get exact matches rather than sending alerts for 'games' or 'console' alone. The -xbox360 means you wont get alerts on threads that also mention xbox360.. maybe because you're still waiting for the chance to buy one.. Wink

You can further refine alerts by selecting a specific category. By default your account is set to 'all' which maybe what you want but drilling down the categories will improve relevancy. For example if you set your account to send alerts on "apple" you would get alerts about apple computers as well as fruit! So if you select the "Computers & Internet" you will get no more (or at least less Wink ) alerts about fruit.

When using BoardTracker for search there are a few handy ways to improve relevancy..

First you can again use the category system to narrow down the search - this action alone can produce very much more focused results.

Use negative search terms.. as with the alerts example above you can define words that you don't want to appear in results like this..

Code:
xbox -xbox360


You can also narrow down your search to a specific board using site search. This works in a similar way to that on other search engines like so..

Code:
site:domain.com "search term"


There are many other ways to refine you search and alerts which are described on the relevant help sections so check those out also....
Comments (0) | Views 5457 | Topic Tags:


No new posts Reputation & Brand Monitoring with BoardTracker
Posted by: Administrator on Fri Dec 23, 2005 7:43 pm

People like to talk and amongst other things they like to talk about products and companies they have heard about or in some way dealt with either as a customer or partner or some other kind of business relationship.

Now this is all well and good if what people say about you is positive, but this is not always the case.. sooner or later somebody will feel the urge to complain about your products or perhaps perceived bad service or restrictive terms of use or the way your business conducts itself or even in what field your business operates. Sometimes these people complaining may have a legitimate grievance, however they could also be part of an orchestrated 'smear campaign' initiated by a competitor for example.

Many times people will just have an interest in working with you, buying your products or services, and are simply doing some research online by asking for others experiences and discussing the matter before making any decisions.

Further still you will find many prospective clients who may never have even heard of your company or specific product name but they are in the market for it - for example he or she may be looking to buy a new car and so goes online to research 'cars' and asks on the forums for advice on which car to buy.

In this global economy it is quite common for companies around the world to spring up and use the same names for the company or products (even if totally unrelated) and when that happens you need to be sure that your own trademarks and brand name are not being infringed upon because if they are you have to defend them!

There is a common theme about all these cases - YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT IT WHEN IT HAPPENS!

When someone talks about you, your products, your company or your brand you need to be on the ball and be there right away to resolve the issue because anything said in forums is public and will remain there for anyone to see for years to come. If someone had a bad experience you should be there quick as possible to offer a replacement product/service, throw in some freebies, or whatever it takes to win that person back to your side. When you win that person over you are also potentially winning favour with everyone else who is reading even if they come across the forum thread a month or even a year later.

If someone is just trying to drag your company name down with no good reason (say a competitor) you need to be there like a shot and defend your brand. If the aforementioned prospective car buyer is posting on forums somewhere and your company is 'Dels Distinguished Motors' you better get in there quick to close a sale before your competitor 'Daves Dodgy Motors' steals it away from you!

If on the other hand people are just saying good things then first of all its nice to know about it when it happens but secondly its valuable positive feedback - you are doing something right so you need to keep doing it!

Clearly it is ESSENTIAL to keep on top of what people talk about on the boar...
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No new posts Make (More) Money With BoardTracker
Posted by: Administrator on Fri Dec 23, 2005 7:38 pm

Its not just hype - you actually can make money by harnessing the power of BoardTracker or at the very least it can help prevent potential loss of income due to missed opportunities, not to mention loss of reputation if a disgruntled client (or dastardly competitor) starts posting unflattering remarks about your company or your products/services on forums all over the net!

BoardTracker is a search engine specially for forums and provides instant alerts by email or Jabber. Using the alerts feature of BoardTracker you can create targeted search terms and be notified by email or if you are a premium member also by instant message using Jabber almost immediately, allowing you to respond to the thread quickly and hopefully close a sale or initiate a business relationship. You can actually choose to be alerted by email and IM or one or the other or disable alerts completely.

An example of this could be if you are a web hosting company you can set your alert search term on BoardTracker to include the following words.. [ "web hosting" server* dedicated ] or something similar and then when someone posts on any forum asking a question about hosting or servers, you or your reps can be there with the answers ahead of your competition!

If you have a company employing sales and marketing reps then you should provide them with a BoardTracker account as it is clearly an invaluable marketing tool when used correctly. You or your staff can focus on highly targeted areas to maximize potential and minimize time wasted.

Just be careful to pay close attention to the rules for commercial posting on the various boards & forums before jumping in with both feet or you may anger the board owners and community which would be counter-productive....
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No new posts BoardTracker for Making Contact
Posted by: Administrator on Fri Dec 23, 2005 7:36 pm

Although BoardTracker is primarily a search engine and message tracking service, an interesting side-effect of the alerts mechanism is that people can and often do use it in order to contact other people who use BoardTracker even if they do not normally frequent the same forums.

How and why goes like this.. say you are an affiliate of amazon.com for example and you have tried to contact them via email but for various reasons (spam filtering, bad routing, overworked support or affiliate reps or whatever) they didn't get your email and/or you got no reply.

Now you know (or hope) that the company or person you are trying to contact also uses BoardTracker since it is beneficial to their business, so you can start a thread on any board using keywords which you assume that person will be tracking - in this case it's safe to assume the amazon affiliate rep would be tracking something like "amazon affiliates" or "amazon affiliate program" so they will get an alert from BoardTracker either by Jabber or by email since they will likely have whitelisted BoardTracker alerts.

This benefits both parties, not just the person trying to make contact, since it is quite common for emails from potential or existing clients to be blocked or lost in the ether and obviously you can't whitelist everyone, particulary people you don't yet know! So now using the power and convenience of BoardTracker, people can easily contact you through any forum just by starting a thread with your name or company name or other relevant keyword which is likely to trigger your BoardTracker alerts allowing you to respond appropriately and in a timely fashion which, if you are a business, further enhances your reputation....
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No new posts BoardTracker for Board Addicts
Posted by: Administrator on Fri Dec 23, 2005 7:34 pm

If you are a board addict you know how essential it is to keep up to date with what's happening on the boards or on your favourite forums but even board fanatics need to offline now and then for mundane reasons such as sleep and work or school. So how do you ensure you never miss those critical threads that are vital to your existance?? The answer now is simple - BoardTracker!

With BoardTracker you can sleep soundly in the knowledge that next time you logon you will be notified by email or even instant message if there have been any new threads that interest you for whatever reason and no matter when or where such threads were posted.

How can this be? Easy, with BoardTracker you simply register (free) and setup your alerts search term which contains the keywords and phrases that you want to track. So for example if you want to know about 50 Cent or Paris Hilton threads then you would simply enter "50 cent" and/or "paris hilton" there in the search term box and then sit back and wait for the alerts to arrive - if you can't wait then go to your favourite board and start a thread about the topics you just entered in BoardTracker and soon you will receive an alert about your thread!

What if you don't get an alert? Well first make sure you entered a valid email address in your BoardTracker profile and also check your spam filters don't block emails from BoardTracker. Also check that your favourite forum is actually tracked by BoardTracker - if it isn't then tell the board owner to submit the board or forum for spidering and we'll add it soon!

What do you do if you often start threads and they get very few replies or even none?! One reason is that people just don't see your thread, often because the board is very busy and threads have scrolled off the front page before enough interested people have a chance to see them. Again the solution is BoardTracker - tell all your friends about it and get everyone on your favourite boards to use BoardTracker and you can be sure that in future when you start a thread it wont be missed and it will likely get more replies.

Sometimes even the most dedicated board fanatics run out of things to post about, so what can you do to remedy this terrible situation?? Well I think by now you already know the answer - BoardTracker! Using your search alerts term you can be sure to get notifed of hot new topics on all the boards tracked which gives you food for your own posts on your favourite boards!

So now you can make your time on your favourite board(s) even more fruitful and fun and further contribute towards building a better community for all involved!...
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No new posts New Forums
Posted by: Administrator on Fri Dec 23, 2005 5:08 pm

Finally we got around to creating our own forums for BoardTracker!

These will be primarily for user and board owner support and boardtracker related issues including a place for developers to learn about and discuss methods to use our api (coming soon!) and integrating BT with other systems/applications in a trendy "web 2.0" mashup way. Wink

We also will be using this specific forum for own blog where we will announce new stuff and blog about general board related issues that interest us so keep an eye on this or grab the rss feed.

In case anyone is wondering why BoardTracker uses phpbb for its forums there is no mystery and it does not imply that we favour one board software over another its just that its the one we have used for a long time on our other site at discuss.fotopages.com so we are familiar with it already.

Also check out the 'topic tags' above which are created by the tagging mod for phpbb2 (and soon vbulletin) we are about to release.. its nifty! Cool...
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