The Facebook forum

Emilio wrote:

Facebook Forum
"Bringing 500 Million Facebookers to 1 online Community"



Hey Listener , first i wanna thanks you for your time.
-It's a pleasure, to be honest. I've never been interviewed before, so this is quite shocking! I'm glad you guys think I'm someone 'interesting' to talk to, and, hopefully, my answers will be able to inspire or help some members.

So , Tell us something about you...
-Well, most people know me as The Listener or TL. I'm the head admin and founder of a forum hosted on Forumotion called Facebook Forum, which has over 50,000 posts and almost 9,000 members. I created it a long while ago (about a year and a half ago) knowing nothing about coding or graphics. As time went by, and since I had to do most of the coding and graphics stuff myself, I self-learnt CSS and HTML coding and Photoshop CS4. These have been tools of GREAT use!



Your the founder of the Facebook Forum, What do you wanna achieve with it?
-At first, the forum only had Facebook-related sections, since that was our main goal: talk about Facebook! However, eventually I realized not all registered members on the site had a Facebook account or even cared about Facebook stuff... then we created a bunch of offtopic sections for them to have fun playing games, discussing movies, creating avatars and sigs, etc. And you see, that's Facebook's idea: an all-in-one site

I see its a Very Active community , How you handle that?
-I have a really helpful Staff crew which helps me keep the forum clean and safe daily... which isn't easy sometimes. We get lots of unsafe links and spammers a day, so we're really strict (some people say we're 'too strict', I say we just care too much!) when it comes to that. One great feature the community has is that we give Facebook Help to a lot of people a day. Facebook is full of issues nobody takes care of, and that was something we can help in. We also have a bunch of Facebook Tutorials (all writen by ourselves, none of them is copied from an external site) and Tricks some people are curious about.



You did a great job for the look of the forum , almost exact the same look. Did you do all the work?
-Same look as Facebook? I wouldn't call me a ripper (:P), just someone who likes Facebook simplified style. People seem to like Facebook's look, and that's why we did our best to make it look as good and similar as possible, so that they look like 'twin sites' :P

So, What gave you idea to start a Facebook Forum?
-The idea of Facebook Forum was to have a community were everybody who is on Facebook could also talk and discuss things about this social network outside the website. In this case, the forum. We've merged almost all Facebook applications and efatures (notes, mobile, games, groups, pages, etc.) into one site, and that's what makes it attractive to Facebookers.



How long does the Facebook Forum excist?
-It was founded on March 25th, in 2009.

Was it a hard way to achieve this , Or was it simple?
-Everything is based on hard work. It's not possible to have a 'good' or 'succesful' forum is you don't put any effort into it. I'm online on it everyday, and I pretty much enjoy what I do, even though it requires a lot of time and patience.

With how many employees did you started and how many do you have now?
-Let's see... we used to have a lot of Moderators in the past. As most of them were uneeded or went inactive after a week of having been promoted, I thought it'd be better to only have a reduced group of helpful people I can trust in, which is my current Staff. It's some sort of family, to be honest... we all get along real well and really enjoy what we do.



Last question , Any Plans in the future for the Facebook Forum?
-Our main goal would be Facebook to recommend us or post the link to our forum somewhere, someday. We've discussed this a hundred times in the past, but haven't lost any hoped yet. Fingers crossed!