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Pre-sales
"How do you offer these forums free?" That's simple. We rely on advertiser revenues to support us. We are determined to stay free, and not switch you over to a paid service like other companies often plan to do. "What kinds of advertisements? Nothing intrusive I hope." Free Forums is committed to providing a positive experience for posters. As such, we refuse to use any kind of popups or spyware on our forums. Our ads are 728x90 or 468x60 pixel banners, and most are nothing more than text ads with topics relevant to your forum. See them in action on one of our memeber's forums here. "But I don't like advertisements." Well, we have to pay for hosting a development costs somehow, right? But for those that are determined not to have advertisements, you can upgrade to a paid no-ad account in your administration panel. "How much commitment do these 'paid accounts' take?" Instead of charging by month, which usually works out to unfairly distribute resources to more popular forums, while smaller ones pick up the bill, forum admins can buy 'ad credits'. These ad credits cost 15 cents for 1000, and each one will remove one banner from your page. So for 45 cents, you could remove 3,000 banner impressions from your forum. This works out to be less than a few dollars a year for most forums. Minimum purchase is $2.95. "Can I sign up for multiple forums?" As long as you use them, we have no problem with you having 1 or 100. Each ad-free forum must be paid for seperately, but regular forums with our banners are always completely free. |
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Board Members
"Some of my posts seem to be disappearing." We run a regular sweep to keep forums running efficiently. Any posts older than 180 days are deleted. If you want to keep a post around, make sure it's edited or replied to every few months. "I can't see all the posts in threaded mode."/"My posts aren't appearing!" Threaded mode is extremely processor intensive compared to flat mode and we have been borderline about offering it from the start. To try and control the processor time used, threaded mode only displays posts up to 8 levels deep. Anything beyond that is simply ignored by the system. If you must see the other posts, please log into your profile page and change your preference to flat viewing. We apologize for the inconvenience. "Just how long can a post be?" Very long :). Posts are limited to 65,000 characters, which should be more than long enough. Subject lines are limited to 100 characters. |
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Board Administrators
"I created a forum/board and now it's gone." At 1:00 am US Eastern Standard Time our server makes a sweep of the system. Any forums/boards with no messages are deleted. If you create a new forum/board, try to avoid doing it near that time, and make sure you post something yourself, such as a welcome message. "Why do changes take so long to go into effect? Don't you pull info directly from the database in real-time?" In order to keep the forum systems running quickly (unlike many other board systems), we only hit the database once and then cache that info in the server's memory. The server can then access the info at lightning quick speeds and run your forums faster. The only drawback is that since the data is only checked against the database once every 30-60 minutes, changes take a little while to take effect. A small price to pay for a huge performance boost. "Just how long can a description be?" Very long :). Forum and board descriptions are limited to 65,000 characters, which should be more than long enough. Just remember, if you make it that long, your viewers may not be very happy with the extended download times and huge forum sizes. |
