Dear vBulletin community,
I'm an active reader (and occasional poster) on a few vbulletin sites. I travel often and sometimes really wish that I was able to download my unread forums/messages for reading on the airplane or other places without internet access. I've tried using a few offline browsers to do that, but none of them work very well with forums, especially in the case where you have 20 pages of messages in one topic, but there are only new messages in the last two pages... the offline browsers tend to download all 20 pages.
I own a company that does offshore software development (hence traveling often) and I started to think about developing a full featured offline reader for vbulletin forums that could be sold to vbulletin users with needs like mine. The reader would manage subscriptions to forums/topics to minimize downloading of unneeded information. I will not get into all the features here, but the reader would be very useful for navigating the forums, subscribing or unsubscribing to new forums and topics, and minimizing/tuning the quantity of information downloaded in a session. Then the messages could be read offline (or transferred to a PDA) and offline posts could be composed and uploaded on the next connect. Such a reader might be even useful to participants on forums with no real requirement to work offline.
Such a development project would be reasonably large, so I need to understand the potential market and problems.
I believe the reader could be very interesting for you as owners/operators of vbulletin systems, and the greatest opportunity (and possible conflicts) would be with you. I believe that by making access to the forums more convenient, the reader could boost participation in the forums. But I also think some admins might not be happy with it because it might promote lurking, advertisements might not get as many views/clicks, and there could be worries about effects of "Delayed posts" that people write offline and upload 8 hours later when (in a really active topic) the thread has already moved on.
So I wanted to ask you some questions:
1. Would you see a problem with your users working with your forum in such a way? Or would you think that allowing users to download and read offline (and later upload their posts) would increase the participation in your forum? Would you feel that it somehow violated your terms of service?
2. Users would likely have the ability to disable downloading of banner ads on the pages/messages they download from the forum. (So if they were connecting on a low bandwidth connection like GPRS they could cut their download time). How big of a problem would that be for you?
3. Would you, as vbulletin forum owner/operator, be interested to offer such a reader on your site if you got commission from every sale to a user that comes through a link on your site? Would that compensate you for lost "banner click" revenue?
4. What % of your active users (let's say the users who have logged in during the past week) do you think would be interested in using such a reader if it cost less than $30? Basically I am trying to understand the size of the market. (I can get some statistics on the number of users during the last week on major vbulletin boards from big-boards.com, although I'm not sure how accurate their figures are).
Don't hesitate to give me any other relevant opinions/advice/warnings you might have.
Thanks!
Ron
PS. If you know of any offline reader for vBulletin forums, let me know. I've searched for one but did not find it.
PPS. I wanted to post this on vbulleting.org in "Modifications not available?", but I do not have permission because (so far) I do not have any vbulletin software.
I'm an active reader (and occasional poster) on a few vbulletin sites. I travel often and sometimes really wish that I was able to download my unread forums/messages for reading on the airplane or other places without internet access. I've tried using a few offline browsers to do that, but none of them work very well with forums, especially in the case where you have 20 pages of messages in one topic, but there are only new messages in the last two pages... the offline browsers tend to download all 20 pages.
I own a company that does offshore software development (hence traveling often) and I started to think about developing a full featured offline reader for vbulletin forums that could be sold to vbulletin users with needs like mine. The reader would manage subscriptions to forums/topics to minimize downloading of unneeded information. I will not get into all the features here, but the reader would be very useful for navigating the forums, subscribing or unsubscribing to new forums and topics, and minimizing/tuning the quantity of information downloaded in a session. Then the messages could be read offline (or transferred to a PDA) and offline posts could be composed and uploaded on the next connect. Such a reader might be even useful to participants on forums with no real requirement to work offline.
Such a development project would be reasonably large, so I need to understand the potential market and problems.
I believe the reader could be very interesting for you as owners/operators of vbulletin systems, and the greatest opportunity (and possible conflicts) would be with you. I believe that by making access to the forums more convenient, the reader could boost participation in the forums. But I also think some admins might not be happy with it because it might promote lurking, advertisements might not get as many views/clicks, and there could be worries about effects of "Delayed posts" that people write offline and upload 8 hours later when (in a really active topic) the thread has already moved on.
So I wanted to ask you some questions:
1. Would you see a problem with your users working with your forum in such a way? Or would you think that allowing users to download and read offline (and later upload their posts) would increase the participation in your forum? Would you feel that it somehow violated your terms of service?
2. Users would likely have the ability to disable downloading of banner ads on the pages/messages they download from the forum. (So if they were connecting on a low bandwidth connection like GPRS they could cut their download time). How big of a problem would that be for you?
3. Would you, as vbulletin forum owner/operator, be interested to offer such a reader on your site if you got commission from every sale to a user that comes through a link on your site? Would that compensate you for lost "banner click" revenue?
4. What % of your active users (let's say the users who have logged in during the past week) do you think would be interested in using such a reader if it cost less than $30? Basically I am trying to understand the size of the market. (I can get some statistics on the number of users during the last week on major vbulletin boards from big-boards.com, although I'm not sure how accurate their figures are).
Don't hesitate to give me any other relevant opinions/advice/warnings you might have.
Thanks!
Ron
PS. If you know of any offline reader for vBulletin forums, let me know. I've searched for one but did not find it.
PPS. I wanted to post this on vbulleting.org in "Modifications not available?", but I do not have permission because (so far) I do not have any vbulletin software.
Comment