Marketing Microcosm

I see its now a flat rate of £5/month.

What is the thinking behind that? Do you think that will hinder take up, or is it a pragmatic decision that anyone not willing to pay £5/m is unlikely to make you much money anyway?

(feel free to tell me to stop being so nosey, just interested)

About page looks really nice, like an actual real professional site

Actually the purpose of the flat-rate fee is just to stop us going bankrupt very fast if it turns out we're the new Yahoo Groups.

We firmly believe there is more money in the transactions within a community than within a hosting fee, and that charging a hosting fee is to burden the forum with a problem of "How do we make it cover it's costs?".

And what happens if a guy creates a forum for his 10 golf buddies? That is unlikely to every produce transactions that will make us revenue, what then?

Whilst the cost of a forum is negligible, and the cost of an active user is negligible, if you have 10,000 forums with 100,000 active users... the cost is no longer trivial.

So the $10 per month, £5 per month... whatever that basic fee is, it's just to ensure that for 10,000 forums we'd be making north of £0.5m in revenue per year and thus would not be sunk by our optimistic naivety (that all forums would be like LFGSS).

I much prefer the design of microcosm than the forum generated by it.

I find microcosm well styled and cutting edge while the forums a bit too simple...

One of the big problems we're trying to solve is the technical barriers to using a forum... for end users.

That doesn't mean we're not including features, but it means we're spending a lot of effort presenting them in a really simple way.

We want the forum interface to appear simplistic, and intuitive, and to ultimately vanish from the experience so that a user very quickly is just communicating, sharing, organising stuff... without regard for the forum technology itself.

In that respect... minimalism, simplicity and elegance of the experience are by-choice design goals.

If we could make it simpler, we would.

To what extent can I customise my forum in this beta phase ? (http://porridge.microcosm.app/microcosms/173/) like can I replace 'microc.sm' logo top right with my own logo/pic?

Also does the 173 mean this is the 173rd microcosm?

Also is it worth grabbing some key microcosm domain names now which may be worth loads in the future (Like flyfishing.micrco.sm)

(Also my gf who is 'on here' says she struggles to use this forum as its so hard. The simplicty of microcsm is its usp. She likes it)

Simple is good, I was speaking about the design that looks a bit poor in terms of appearance, but that it's just my view, i suppose.

To what extent can I customise my forum in this beta phase ? (http://porridge.microcosm.app/microcosms/173/) like can I replace 'microc.sm' logo top right with my own logo/pic?

Yes, go to https://microcosm.app/ to sign-in (top right) and then edit your site.

On the edit page you can upload a new logo, change the title or description, edit the background colour, change the font colour.

And eventually we'll add the default permissions management and navigation management to that page.

Also does the 173 mean this is the 173rd microcosm?

Yes.

Also is it worth grabbing some key microcosm domain names now which may be worth loads in the future (Like flyfishing.micrco.sm)

Not really.

As you can see with Islington CC, most people will use their own domain names with the service.

So there is no point trying to have a landrush on subdomains.

forum.flyfishing.com could easily point to jhasgdfjkhg.microcosm.app and it would be invisible to the world.

Thanks velocio. It really is easy to use and edit
Currently I can only edit the logo, and background colour/image
Will there be more editing options like font text colour etc?

You can edit the link colours, but not the font text colour (unlinked).

Would you want to?

We wanted to make sure that readability was basically protected from anyone breaking it. That the contrast couldn't be changed, and that comments would always be really readable.

To ask the annoying question that I do every few months: when's LFGSS moving over?

I know... not soon enough.

Everything has taken longer than we hoped, and I had hoped it would be now.

It's a perpetual 2 months away.

Or the new empty one Mark just created: http://lfgsss.microcosm.app/

Export and import is the next big thing we need to do.

We have a lot of phpBB sites to do, a few vBulletin ones, and a couple of Vanilla ones.

How do I delete a forum?
I can edit it but can't sees delete button
Want to delete this http://porridge.microcosm.app/microcosms/175/

Good work! I've just noticed that I can sign into islington.cc as snottyotter due to my reserved username. Is this going to give any kind of supertroll powers or will people be able to ban me from certain microcosms, or require me to go through a nursery type period on their site? I'm guessing if it's some sort of private site I'd need to be approved before I can sign in. Will posting stats be site wide or will posts on one microcosm go towards a grand total of some kind?

I can't imagine anyone letting you into the porridge forum, it would just get way too messy.

A little late for that.

That'll be why David immediately wants to delete it, then. :)

How much does it cost?
In other real currencies.. eg; bitcoin?

http://microcosm.app/compare/

Should formatting on the feature table have BBCode twice or should one of them be html?

Nope, I just forgot which column was which after scrolling down.

Good work! I've just noticed that I can sign into islington.cc as snottyotter due to my reserved username. Is this going to give any kind of supertroll powers or will people be able to ban me from certain microcosms, or require me to go through a nursery type period on their site? I'm guessing if it's some sort of private site I'd need to be approved before I can sign in. Will posting stats be site wide or will posts on one microcosm go towards a grand total of some kind?

Permissions apply to each forum section, so you'll be able to log in to all sites but might not be able to read/post/whatever depending on what the site owner wants.

e.g. Islington has a private club section that you won't be able to see. You also can't post anywhere but the welcome section if you aren't a club member.

The username reservation doesn't grant any special powers. Except maybe* a badge one day, because that would be a nice way to recognise the support.

• I just thought of this and haven't discussed it with VB, don't count on it.
  

Badge list:.

1. mashton
   2.
   

http://www.bikebiz.com/news/read/cycle-specific-forum-software-aims-to-bring-club-members-together/016126
.

How's it going since the launch
how many people have created sites?
How many microcosm sites are there now? Is there a directory of all public microcosms?
What type of subject are popular?

(http://www.gamespot.com/microcosm/forums/)

Will there be a site created exclusively for answering all David's questions? ;)

Who knows about the forum migration?
Is this 'news' in the geek-tech world?
If not shouldn't it become news now we are here?

I agree. Let's blow the trumpet.

Perhaps @sparky might like to write an article about it?