Forum down for upgrades

thenthornthing

robt wrote: »

That (the bit I have put in bold) is total rubbish though. This site barely makes the top 75 biggest forums, around 30 of which use vBulletin. I use three of those 30 myself, and only one of them has minor glitches like this one. I however doubt that any of those 30 use an 'out of the box' vBulletin installation, as others have said.

I think you are quite naive about affiliate links - they pay many many more times money than a click of an advert does. On a site I run I get £20 just for someone signing upto an affiliate link and spending around 70p (the hope is that they will spend more of course). Affiliate links are big big business. In addition to that, don't forget all those pennies that add up from the MP3 price checker etc. Just to add - I certainly don't begrudge the site for using them at all - it is how the site is funded, and people should use them where possible.

If there was a major problem after implementation of an upgrade I would expect the site to be rolled back to the last good version. But I really don't think this (search issue) is a major problem that could justify that, it is probably just worth tweaking now that it is live.

Sorry, forgot about this topic...

Ok, so not the biggest vBulletin forum, but it is one of the biggest as I say. vBulletin must see it that way as they have been using it for their experiments and live testing so-to-speak.

Affiliate links... big business yes, but how many people do go through and complete sales etc. I tried it once, for a few months. My small site had not one sale, but then it did then get about less than a hundred unique views a day. With a big site like this, I'd expect a relative decent sized proportion, but that money still has to pay for the upkeep inc. staff wages etc. That, and the tunechecker is the bulk of the income really. Excluding interviews, other TV/paper appearances/columns etc.

At least the problems solved now.

robt_2

thenthornthing wrote: »

Sorry, forgot about this topic...

Ok, so not the biggest vBulletin forum, but it is one of the biggest as I say. vBulletin must see it that way as they have been using it for their experiments and live testing so-to-speak.

Affiliate links... big business yes, but how many people do go through and complete sales etc. I tried it once, for a few months. My small site had not one sale, but then it did then get about less than a hundred unique views a day. With a big site like this, I'd expect a relative decent sized proportion, but that money still has to pay for the upkeep inc. staff wages etc. That, and the tunechecker is the bulk of the income really. Excluding interviews, other TV/paper appearances/columns etc.

At least the problems solved now.

There is the difference - this site had 9.5 million unique visitors last month! Remember there is also the weekly email crammed full of info and links - think about how many times someone sees a deal they think is good and then forwards the email on to a friend or relative to show them and they click the link to have a look - all those affiliated cookies stored ready for use! It really is big business - but small websites would really struggle for make anything from them (which is a shame).

But it can be done - here is a screen-grab of one of my sites stats (note they are weekly payouts too, not monthly).

thenthornthing

You win lol.

Point proven Sorry :doh: