KickstarterForum.org

So yea, maybe some of you will get a laugh at this one.

Yes, compared to its competitors XenForo is not all that expensive and very reasonably priced for what it is our community is primarily 13-17 year olds so we didn't feel comfortable using the traditional donation schemes most other boards use. One of our rival message boards recently had a scandal of PayPal donation fraud so instead, so instead, to fund our transition to XenForo, we made a Kickstarter campaign.

http://kck.st/1jPUvvj

And yea our goal size is so ridiculously small we were actually rejected from IndieGoGo. Our running joke is we were to "indie" for the site. We figured with our community it was best to set the goal as low as possible, just the base forum licence to start, then backload the plugins we wanted to licence in our stretch goals.

As for the video, my god that was cheese as hell, but we figured it was better to play up the ham (thus the Google Hangouts) than try to do something we could not. Figured better to have a video so bad its funny, that our community could later laugh about then look lazy and have no video at all.

Feedback welcome. Is our video as bad as I think it is? I think it is pretty bad.

You were rejected from Indiegogo because you had too small of a goal? Congrats on hitting it. I use PHPBB for this message board. It's free and hosting is a minimal cost, maybe $4/month if you do shared hosting.

Out of curiosity, why don't you guys use ads on your board to fulfill the costs?

Out of curiosity, why don't you guys use ads on your board to fulfill the costs?

The only kind of ads that would make sense would be affiliate marketing through "Friends of J-List" with its up to 12% comissions but we did some experiments, both with this and some Amazon Affiliate marketing and returns were minimal. First problem had to do with our young demographic and the other the high ratio of ad-block among our users. I certainly did some tests and it just wasn't a viable.

Our community's demographics puts 70% of our members in the 13-17 age range with approximately 65% female. Just with everyone being so young any eyeballs we have to possibly sell just aren't worth that much. We used to run on shared hosting but we just grew to big, at peak times there may be 100+ concurrent users, daily. Just used too much resources and we had to move to a VPS.

Likewise, we tried PHPBB and other free scripts before but there are some very specific features and plugins on XenForo that really appeal to my community. Seems like most of the community agrees. Not only fully funded our transition but got us 1/3rd through all our stretch goals with 20+ days to go!

And yes, we were rejected from IndieGoGo for having too small of a goal under their "fixed funding" option. They want all projects to be $500 at the very least, our start goal as you can see was $200 and $500 would have been much more than we needed and one harder to justify to the community.

Ah, that all makes a lot of sense. I assume you've also tried adsense and the adblocking from your users made it not a viable alternative.

I see that you hit your goal! Awesome! Are you thinking of introducing stretch goals or add ons?