MON(FX)

One Week Update: UNCForum.com

I’m finally well-rested and ready for action after an intense week of publicity for my new project, UNCForum.  It’s taken a lot of energy out of me and has limited my blogging abilities as well but hopefully I’ll be able to get back to this on a more regular schedule now that the main launch is pretty much over.

So what is UNCForum.com?

My friend Mike and I noticed that while cell phones and Facebook were the primary means of contact for most students on campus, there was really no way for someone to have an open discussion or share something with the greater campus network as a whole.  Both of the mentioned tools limits your audience to the friends you already have or wish to contact, there is no easy way to leverage the usefulness of a small network community as a means of sharing ideas, pubbing events or selling things.

As we talked about these issues, it became apparent that a forum could solve many of these issues.  It made a lot of sense, and some pretty big universities around our state already had them.  Why then, did a nationally recognized university such as UNC not have a forum in which it’s students could effectively communicate?  We decided to take a stab at solving this issue fast and effectively, taking notes from the already successful forums on other networks.

So far, every other project I have worked on has required the use of custom developed software and a unique product, used for a wide community usually scattered around the world.  UNCForum.com is my first real attempt at using readily-available software to capture a small, local community - an incredibly niche market.  I had many doubts intially that this kind of project had viability, but after throughly examing all possible outcomes, I decided it was worthwhile.

Behind the Scenes

The forum is completely bare-bones - there are no advanced private messaging systems, no complex graphics or unnecessary features.  Paired with a minimal design, the site loads at an average of 0.020 seconds, blazing fast (IMO) for a site running on shared hosting.  To help keep the forum exclusive to the university community, a valid UNC email address is required when registering.  The forums available right now are very basic and very few, just enough to keep the a variety of topics being discussed without overwhelming users.  Private forums are being leveraged for various student groups to facilitate discussion within groups without opening up to the greater community.  Rather than sacrificing usability for features, we opted to use several small hacks on a lightweight script to create a forum that fits our needs.

That’s a basic introduction to UNCForum.com - an online student forum made for the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  Tomorrow I’ll get into how we marketed this site to get more than 300 users in less than a week.