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Afraid we are a bit tough on self promo, as it tends to open the flood gates. But if you upgrade your listing, then you will display your weblink in your forum sig, as well as be welcome to use the Village Market.

Or if you become a regular and quality forum contributor, we may just give you a courtesy upgrade 

I've decided now after having seen it run on a few of our machines that I'm firmly in the anti windows 8 camp.

Maybe a change of hardware is also to blame, but reliability has definitely gone down hill. We've replace 2 HP Win 7 laptops with Lenovo Win 8.1 ones, and I'm less than impressed. Blue screens of death which I haven't seen since Win 2000/early Win XP days, and Windows update failures, again something I've not seen for a long time.

This morning Sage crashed on our bookkeepers HP Win 8.1 machine, which led to a Sage support call and apparently known issues with 8.1.

I'm quite happy with my Windows 7 HP DV7. Its technically due for renewal but shall will stick with it for at least another 12 months and try and bypass Win 8.1 completely

We started to move to Lenovo as HP lappies seemed to have gone down in reliability, but Lenovo seem no better and not a patch on the old IBM built machines. Maybe technology has peaked and everything is going backwards  Etch a Sketch's all round?

Please don't suggest a Mac... I'd have an internal revolution 

Top man, we need lots more of you 

Obviously not all hobbyist and link dumpers are bad..  I'll get my coat...

Kind word from Barney

Originally Posted by Andy-C27

“I'm still here    But yes you are right ,such a pity a lot of people disappear after a few posts.. ”

It is an age old problem. A lot of people (majority) are just looking for a quick bumpstart promotion and tend to do the forum rounds, dropping web links where they can, doing self promo posts, then leg it, or give up and go bust in a few months. These tend to be the hobbyists.

There are so many more avenues these days than traditional forums, and in the old days, 90% of the forums were all vbulletin powered and you knew straight away what you were doing.

Some of the platforms now vary in quality and tend to be obsessed with huge in your face adverts, in a bid to squeeze more money out of declining traffic as everyone competes for market share.

We shoved this forum onto home grown software mainly because I couldn't find a decent vbulletin replacement I liked, and we were never happy with some of the constant spam and overhead.

It's been running in this format for just over a year now, and the spam has become a trivial trickle. The majority of new sign ups never actually make it to the live stage, which is great for spam control, but then you realise that a lot of the previous membership was spam 

Unfortunately the new forum coincided with a new project which has been absorbing most of our time so it's never really had the marketing attention it deserves.

But now we finally have a marketing manager on-board to help me out, the plan is to start pushing and promoting MLS and the forum, so hopefully we will start to see more regular contributors over the coming weeks and months. 

But also concious of quality versus quantity unlike some other forums, who just keep re-churning the same topic over and over again.

Key thing is interesting and conversational new threads. Interesting threads encourage participation so feel free to start some conversations. Don't worry about putting them in the wrong place, we can easily move them for you  

But I'm a forum fan and find waffling away therapeutic and a good way of relaxing. Even better if there's someone that actually reads  them or add's their 5 pence worth 

We've got a few old guard on here, like Barney, Dreamraven, Sharpink, Legalstop and CareersPartnership and a few newer ones like yourself, Colonwhisperer and Centric.

Just need another couple of hundred and we've cracked it

Well according to the BBC 

#BBCtrending: Why slightly flabby middle-aged guys are suddenly sexy

Apparently middle-age chunky monkeys are all the rage with the female community. If the Beeb says it's true it's good enough research for me 

It seems to stem from a 19 year old student article, who obviously knows what she's talking about...

"...Girls tend to picture their future together with their guys early on. Therefore, if he already has the dad bod going on, we can get used to it before we date him, marry him, have three kids. We know what we are getting into when he's got the same exact body type at the age of 22 that he's going to have at 45."

Why Girls Love The Dad Bod - Mackenzie Pearson

It just all simply confirms what I've always suspected, I am an undercover Adonis...  

Assuming you are an SEO company, so you don't use Facebook in your clients campaigns?

Hi Andy, either click/select your avatar/logo or username and it will take you to your profile page which shows your stats.

Or just hover a mouse over your avatar/logo

Hi Barry, this was a timely reminder to update an ongoing thread about social media campaigns.

Starting Social Media Campaigns from Scratch - and the results

I'm a convert now for Facebook advertising after rubbishing it in the past. It is now pretty slick and you can target and exclude audiences, so you shouldn't (in theory) experience your problem of non local clicks.

Did you set your geographic preferences? You can isolate right down to the local town.

We have struggled with setting up purely Facebook adverts and getting a decent return from them. Instead we have found boosted posts to be 100% more effective. You can tailor your audience geographically and by interest, giving almost as much control as purely adverts.

Why boosted posts work better than just adverts though I have no idea  

Time for an update now we are 4 months in.

FB 467 likes, Twitter 139 followers and Google Plus a declining total of 4!

There is a reason for Google Plus, it seems I set up the wrong type of page, meaning it wouldn't show in Google maps or have the ability to leave reviews. The main aim for this page was to show up in the Google results for Brand search terms. So I had to delete the Google page and create a new one, going through the pain of waiting for a postcard validation pin number being sent.

So lesson learnt, make sure you set up the correct Google Plus page from the beginning! 

To be honest, Facebook and Twitter are on semi tickover mode as they have served their purpose to generate initial interest, but will ramp up again shortly when the scheme is publicly launched and the social media channels will be used to reinforce messages.

But in summary, Facebook promotional campaigns have been very successful at generating interest and leads for a new service, which may be worth considering for any startups.