For like two years now, I’ve wanted to add a forum to jangro.com. The primary motivation to do that is this single blog post:
How To Replace the Color Wheel in Your Samsung DLP Television and Save $400
I can’t even begin to tell you the pain that post has caused me, not to mention the guys at Disqus who had to swallow (and choke on) all those comments on the day they launched their comment import feature, and then serve them up with every page view.
Of course as an online marketer, I wouldn’t trade it for the world. I’ve made some nice money on affiliate sales from it. But that’s another story.
Anyway, that single post has turned into a forum itself. There are hundreds of conversations going on in there. And there’s no end in sight, even three years later. And to make matters worse, for every post in there, I get an email from someone asking for help on their broken TV.
There’s a freakin’ community of Television repair Do-it-yourselfers living in the comments of that post. I can’t think of a more painful place to live, and therefore, I’d like to give them a forum.
I’ve been through several false starts on launching a forum. I’ve dabbled with phpbb, vbulletin, and even Automattic’s own slowest moving software project that you’ve never heard about, bbPress. None were easy to drop into my blog and have a forum that was integrated well enough to satisfy me. It’s been backburnered for probably a year now.
Then today I read this post at copyblogger, The Perfect Pair:
3 Reasons Every Blogger Needs a Forum. While I agree with the points the author made, I didn’t need to get past the headline.
Maybe, just maybe someone’s solved this problem by now. Give me easy blog-forum integration, please!
Behold, Simple:Press. It’s a wordpress plugin that drops right in, uses the wordpress user database, and requires nearly zero configuration.
I had the new Jangro.com Forum up and running in like 10 minutes.
Check it out: Jangro Forum
For the record, for those people who thought the same of Bumpzee, this is NOT a power-play move to wrest the affiliate forum gig from Abestweb. As if. Haiko’s got nothing to worry about. That’s been proven time and time again.
