ForumDirectory.com: The story from a hand reg to waiting it out for The King (1.Viewing)

When I first launched ForumDiscovery.com on August 16, 2024 (as an integral part of my forum network, going to span 25+ forums over the next year), it didn't quite feel like the premium domain I imagined for a forum directory, and as a domain name investor, it was always in the back of my head that it wasn't the one. I always had ForumDirectory.com in mind, but the hefty $9,750 price tag made it hard to justify for such a niche project when I also needed capital for other Forum names (also to buy out already developed forums), and the fact that forums aren't as popular today as they once were when compared to the 2000s-2010s era.

To get the domain a bit cheaper, I came up with a strategy: I slowed down development on ForumDiscovery for several months, hoping the owner of ForumDirectory.com might lower the price if interest seemed low. This, however, did not seem to work in my favor, as the price never came down. Additionally, after doing this, my phone calls and texts to try and negotiate a sale fell on deaf ears.

Since this domain was always on my radar, I immediately noticed when it expired; some might call that perfect timing. I closely tracked the domain expiring auction listing for it, ready to jump in at the last moment. But just as the auction was ending at a price of $0 with no bids, the owner renewed the domain. That was an incredibly frustrating moment, having tracked the auction for over 20 days. I finally realized that I might just have to ante up the $9,750 to purchase it in order to pursue development full-steam.

Fortunately, when ForumDirectory.com was eventually relisted for sale with a buy-now-price ("BIN"), the asking price dropped significantly. Seeing that this was likely the best deal I'd get, and it was priced at roughly what I intended to pay anyway, I quickly seized the opportunity and bought the domain.

Today, I can say that ForumDirectory.com is the premier destination for discovering new forums (or now coined "Reddit alternatives" on Reddit [yes, we're that old if we're using forums and they are now classified as "Reddit alternatives"]) with over 1000 live forums — with hundreds still queued to be added — listed in a multitude of categories, which are still being sorted out and refined to the most relevant categories and being tagged to link similar forums across different categories for visitors of the forum directory to easily discover forums that they may be interested in.

I'm also working on rolling out some exciting new features, including the ability to filter forums by platform (such as XenForo, VB, and others) and sorting based on user activity where ForumDirectory will track listed forum's user, message, and post counts to show the most active forums of the bunch so users can find the most lively communities, if that's what they're seeking, of course.

In other words, there's still a lot of work to be done on ForumDirectory to make it the go-to place to find a forum with ease.

The mission of ForumDirectory is quite clear: To put to rest the notion that forums are dying and to also show this younger generation that there are alternatives to traditional social media. You will notice no ads across the platform as I want to solely focus on users finding forums without a barrage of ads and to keep forums front and center, showing that they are still indeed, alive and well.

If you manage a forum or know of one that should be listed on ForumDirectory, please feel free to promote the forum, as it will be added if it's active—no registration needed!

Welcome back @amplify

For those of you in the know, he used to be an admin over at DNForum.com

I checked out ForumDirectory and see our community at: Buy, Sell & Discuss Canadian .CA Domain Names at DN.ca

I returned the favour here: dn.ca/tools


ForumDirectory is a wonderful idea, personally I prefer forums because deletions or bans on social media are almost out of control and forums have a much more efficient way of storing and distributing content.

I still visit about a dozen forums daily and find Xenforo the nicest platform and a lot of the industry seems to be graduating to it.


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Now about the domain: Coincidentally I remember that domain from some of the listings and I was wondering who would eventually develop it. Knowing @amplify 's history I know the domain is in great hands, he is quite talented and I intend to visit often to seek out other great forums to add to my visit list

MapleDots said:

Now about the domain: Coincidentally I remember that domain from some of the listings and I was wondering who would eventually develop it.

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I wish I saw it at "reseller prices" in some lists over the years on various domaining forums, as I probably would've grabbed it years ago to hoard at a couple of bucks.

Alas, I'm still satisfied with the purchase price.

And, it's finally in hands that will do something with it to shine a light on forums that are buried by search engines day by day.

MapleDots said:

I still visit about a dozen forums daily and find Xenforo the nicest platform and a lot of the industry seems to be graduating to it.

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I believe so, too. I'm heavily invested in XF with more than a dozen XF licenses to varying degrees (to the full package of all 1st party add ons and branding free to just the plain old forum [a couple], with the latter [forum only] used for incubator forums to graduate from). The renewal price of all my licenses exceeds $1000 with discounts applied.

I've also started developing for XenForo as I've noticed, after about 8-10 hours of learning of course, that something I typically would have outsourced for $80-150 could now take me 30-45 minutes to do, and maybe around 2 hours after installing on a dev instance to thoroughly debug before deploying it live. When I'm more comfortable with my coding, the debug testing will go much quicker to push live, and the time vs. outsource benefit will be worth it.

I still have a PT developer on that knows their stuff for more complex tasks though. And, eventually will have to take them on as FT or another PT to maintain the forums when I grow (with my licenses and domains that I intend on developing into forums) and take over other forums.

Very nice, some amazing forums there