Visit my site techgeekforums

[jackbob]

Hey guys, if you are into computers, professional audio or electronics then please check out my new forum and become a member. First to make things clear I am in no way trying to away viewers from the eevblog. I am however using its high traffic to try and get people to come see my site. I just recently made it and it is very similar to daves eevblog as far as layout goes because it is a simple machines forum too. However the topics and areas it covers are different. My forum is mainly for computer geeks, people into professional audio, and basic electronics. The reason for making it is because I wanted to make my own website and host it myself, yes it is being hosted from my own dell servers in my house. I also enjoy helping people because it is how I learned so I decided a forum would be a good idea and went through several different software, I ended up using the simple machines forum. I have a youtube channel https://www.youtube.com/user/kijifled2/ if you want to see it. Remember the forums is very very new there are no users yet so be the first.
My main page is http://techgeekforums.com -please go here first to read the info.
and the forum http://techgeekforums.com/forum
 Hope you guys enjoy!

[PeterG]

Cool youtube channel.

Regards

[FenderBender]

Hey awesome videos. I'm watching your switchmode video right now. Never really knew what those PWM controllers did...got it now.

[EEVblog]

Welcome.
Everyone is of free course to plug their own content on this site (within moderation), unlike some other forums 
The sharing of content is be encouraged!
Good luck with your site.

Dave.

[Mint.]

Man these newbie forums are out of control. I am not against your website and I approve of you having one, but seriously think reality. Nobody is going to join a forum that has minimal traffic and just got started up, especially when you have a layout just like Dave's. Looks a lot like the other rip off forums of Dave. Sorry if I am being too critical, its just that hobbyist electronics isn't such a big topic in cyber space, so why not keep everything on 2 or 3 main forums (eg. EEVBlog, All About Circuits, etc.) instead of everybody starting up a new forum with exactly the same layout.

[jackbob]

Mint., I understand what you mean. Again I'm not trying to become like the eevblog or anything and i didn't copy his forum but used the same program. I used it because I like it most and have tried several other ones. It's not really an electronics forum like this. Its more for computers and audio and basic electronics. This is like hard core electronics all the way through. The main reason I want to make the forum is to gain experience myself because i have been getting into web hosting and site design a lot recently. If you watch my videos you see that I am doing this 100% myself. It would be great to have a site with a decent amount of traffic so i can learn how to manage it. I always enjoyed helping and teaching others what i know and have been doing youtube videos way before i got the idea, but i just got the idea that I could maybe bring the two together. When I get the time to make better videos it should hopefully bring more traffic but i have been incredibly busy making sites for other people. One plus is I will allow computer geeks to upload large files and share them for free as of now i allow 100mb upload but may go to 1gb. Gotta be careful with files that big though don't want to get in trouble for creating the next pirate bay!

[BravoV]

Nothing against your work though, its just you have to be realistic on asking people to join your forum, most members joined at a forum for a "reason".

You need to think and work really hard on this "reason" part, other wise it will be pointless.

As other tons of forums in the net, this forum it self also experienced the long period on waiting for "lurkers" to be converted into real members, yeah, that includes me as well, lurked for years before pulling the trigger to join.

A self sustainable forum needs a tons of effort, dedication (aka life sucking) and the hardest part "time" to mature.

Check this thread, especially on the statistic chart from this forum alone that I posted to get the bigger picture -> Latest EEVBlog forum statistic

My 2 cents.

[jackbob]

Yes I know and most people dont know me either. All my videos on youtube are relatively new and my forum popped up over night. People aren't just gonna come running to me, however if I do good on youtube the forum could become successful. I always watched videos and joined forums but never gave back till recently. About 4 months ago I started pushing out youtube videos left and right. I just need to invest in the quality too. I just get the point across and dont make my videos interesting. Again there are several reasons i'm making the forum though. The Janky home page has got to be fixed, that alone would scare me away. I made it in about 5 minutes in dreamweaver and need to make the first thing people see at least somewhat attractive. No time in the day! almost done with work and back to school. Then i will have loads of time to get things right. The thing is I need to either go all out or dont do it. once i have just a few users i dont want to shut it down. But with just a small number of users its not worth running because i am running a server 24/7 consuming about 250 watts that needs to be cooled so I need to make it worth the cost of running that server.

[EEVblog]

Man these newbie forums are out of control. I am not against your website and I approve of you having one, but seriously think reality. Nobody is going to join a forum that has minimal traffic and just got started up, especially when you have a layout just like Dave's. Looks a lot like the other rip off forums of Dave. Sorry if I am being too critical, its just that hobbyist electronics isn't such a big topic in cyber space, so why not keep everything on 2 or 3 main forums (eg. EEVBlog, All About Circuits, etc.) instead of everybody starting up a new forum with exactly the same layout.

By default, most installations of SMF are going to look exactly like the EEVblog forum, because I'm just using the standard installation and the standard template (one of only a couple) included with the package.

Dave.

[EEVblog]

One plus is I will allow computer geeks to upload large files and share them for free as of now i allow 100mb upload but may go to 1gb. Gotta be careful with files that big though don't want to get in trouble for creating the next pirate bay!

I have to deliberately limit the size of attachments on the EEVblog because I don't have an unlimited space shared server.
My dedicated server only has a 250GB drive, and that could fill up real quick with a popular forum with 300+ posts a day.
Not to mention the cost and bandwidth of backing it all up daily and weekly.

Dave.

[jackbob]

Dave, I have always been curious how much your site demands. How do you maintain such a big forum with only 250gb? With all the user databases and posts alone, that has got to take a fair amount of space. Then on top of that all the pictures! do you go through and delete some of it every so often or store it some other way? Thats why I like hosting things myself I have several TB of storage if needed, that said I also have servers running in my room 24/7 which can also be a job itself to maintain. But it's what I enjoy doing. 

[EEVblog]

Dave, I have always been curious how much your site demands. How do you maintain such a big forum with only 250gb? With all the user databases and posts alone, that has got to take a fair amount of space. Then on top of that all the pictures! do you go through and delete some of it every so often or store it some other way? Thats why I like hosting things myself I have several TB of storage if needed, that said I also have servers running in my room 24/7 which can also be a job itself to maintain. But it's what I enjoy doing. 

Not as much as you'd think for some things.
eevblog.com wordpress + SMF forum takes:

1.3GB SQL database size
21GB of disk space.
0.6TB/month bandwidth (if I had the podcast videos on here, it'd be many TB/month.)
429.65k database accesses/hour
7.16 k database accesses/minute
119.35 database accesses/second
8200 attachments as of 6 months ago.

No I don't delete attachments.
But if I let everyone upload unlimited size from day one I think I'd be in big trouble. Lots of people attempt to upload original files from their cameras for example, many MB per photo.

Dave.

[Mint.]

Dave, I have always been curious how much your site demands. How do you maintain such a big forum with only 250gb? With all the user databases and posts alone, that has got to take a fair amount of space. Then on top of that all the pictures! do you go through and delete some of it every so often or store it some other way? Thats why I like hosting things myself I have several TB of storage if needed, that said I also have servers running in my room 24/7 which can also be a job itself to maintain. But it's what I enjoy doing. 

Not as much as you'd think for some things.
eevblog.com wordpress + SMF forum takes:

1.3GB SQL database size
21GB of disk space.
0.6TB/month bandwidth (if I had the podcast videos on here, it'd be many TB/month.)
429.65k database accesses/hour
7.16 k database accesses/minute
119.35 database accesses/second
8200 attachments as of 6 months ago.

No I don't delete attachments.
But if I let everyone upload unlimited size from day one I think I'd be in big trouble. Lots of people attempt to upload original files from their cameras for example, many MB per photo.

Dave.

Is it possible to get a script or something so the forum automatically downsizes the images?

[EEVblog]

Is it possible to get a script or something so the forum automatically downsizes the images?

Maybe, I haven't really checked for a plugin for that.

Dave.

[jackbob]

There has to be a way because the avatars are resized and saved to that size, thats good because that would be a lot of hifh res pictures to keep. Do you use a plugin for embedding the youtube videos? I think that may be cool to do. I was going to actually store my videos on my server and host them myself with html5 but it would take far more bandwidth than I have.

[EEVblog]

There has to be a way because the avatars are resized and saved to that size, thats good because that would be a lot of hifh res pictures to keep. Do you use a plugin for embedding the youtube videos? I think that may be cool to do. I was going to actually store my videos on my server and host them myself with html5 but it would take far more bandwidth than I have.

No plugin required for embedding Youtube on the blog, just embed the Youtube code.
The forum has a plugin to automatically detect youtube video links and grab the embed code.
I don't host any video on my server.
I have a nother shared server that holds all my podcast videos.

Dave.

[jackbob]

But you don't host the podcast videos right? Do you keep your original YouTube video files stored on a hard disk at home or anything? Or just upload them to YouTube and nuke the files. I would imagine they take a lot of space. If you don't mind me asking how much do you pay to host this forum?

[EEVblog]

But you don't host the podcast videos right? Do you keep your original YouTube video files stored on a hard disk at home or anything? Or just upload them to YouTube and nuke the files. I would imagine they take a lot of space. If you don't mind me asking how much do you pay to host this forum?

I have three servers.
The basic plan dedicated server for eevblog.com and the server:
http://www.hostgator.com/dedicated

A cheap shared server at GreenGeeks.com for various other websites I have. (GreenGeeks booted my podcast files off for using too much bandwidth)

A cheap shared server at HostMonster.com for the podcast video files, and some other websites.
So yes, I host the podcast video files myself:
eevblog.org

And I backup daily with http://www.siteautobackup.com/

I used to run everything (including podcast hosting) on the cheap shared plan at Hostmonster.com, but it eventually got too much. But it did last for at least a year or a year and a half.

Dave.

[jackbob]

That's funny, GreenGeeks couldn't handle Dave's popularity! Well I must say you really have come a long way and do a fantastic job at your videos and on your blog. You have started the next facebook for electronic nerds, your work is appreciated by many.

[jackbob]

OH MY! eevblog.org wow every video ever made is there. I see why you had to reduce the pixel size.

[EEVblog]

Oh, ad I do keep al the files.
Every original HD clip from the camera, the full bitrate rendered version from the editor, and the two final rendered versions that are uploaded to Youtube and eevblog.org for the podcast.
They are saved on two 2TB RAID 1 drive systems.

Dave.