Admin Talk Interview with Mikey

What is your name:
@Mikey

How long have you been running a forum / What inspired you to start?:
10 years. My cousin and I started playing with Proboards and I was hooked. I just enjoyed the shaping it to my own will aspect of things. I wanted a button? Bam, a button. It was great!

What's your Forum Softeware of choice & why?:
I used to be a staunch vBulletin supporter, I helped Brandon with a vBulletin support site, I had my own customization business, I helped anyone whenever I could however when vB4 was released I wasn't happy.

I learnt of XenForo very very early on and became an early adopter for that (I was member number 14). For a time I enjoyed helping others with XenForo through XenFans and I provided much the same support as I did for vBulletin, offering support with general set up, configuration, and even launching xfservices.com which was my own little business again. I wrote custom in-house converters from other software to XenForo, and helped others move to the platform.

Then came the vBulletin vs XenForo lawsuit. XenFans closed down, my friends were leaving the forum 'scene' and custom soon dried up. I just became disenfranchised with the product in general.

Earlier that year I'd switched one of my sites to IP.Board, I was still very much in the XenForo scene at that time and my friends called me crazy. I helped on XenForo support sites but I owned an IP.Board community, people thought it was blasphemy almost.

Anyway, when I finally gave up hope on XenForo, I switched ALL my sites to IP.Board and I'd learnt a lot about it while using it initially on the first community (which was offtopichut.com) so I felt more comfortable with it. This was back in the IP.Board 3.1 days so around 2010/2011. If i ever had a question I got an answer from the friendly community, and I just started to enjoy running forums again.

I continued just running my sites for a year or so, just keeping them up, starting new sites, all the time learning as I went. Then a job opening at IPS opened up and I applied, and got the job, and now I do what I've always done, help people with their forums, as my day job.

Where are you located?:
I live in the city of Derby in the UK, it's near Nottingham so you may have heard of that at least - it's known for Robin Hood (Nottingham, not Derby).

Where do you see your websites in 5 years?:
Hopefully once IPS 4 is released I can repurpose some and focus more on others I have a technology forum for example which I really think would do better with just the tutorials content. I have two gaming sites and I'd love to use one for just news and one for it's already thriving community. IPS 4 will be perfect for that because I can just have a 'News site' or just a 'tutorials site' without needing the forums aspect. I'm excited.

How often do you work on your forum?:
I have too many forums, so I try to focus on a different one each day. I don't have a team of staff, on a lot of the sites it's just me. I should probably work on that

Of all the projects you’ve ever been involved in, which did you enjoy the most?:
I really enjoyed making 30daychallenges.net, and it was a proud moment when that was featured in the Sydney Morning Herald as a part of an 'Improve your lifestyle' article. I also enjoyed working on switchtohtml5.com and getting featured in Smashing Magazine and getting hundreds of thousands of hits in one day.

What are your biggest strengths as a forum admin? Weaknesses?:
I have too many forums is my weakness, my strengths are keeping sites online and making them unique. I'm also a very fast learner so I can master a forum software easily and will soon be helping others and writing modifications for it if needed.

How do you define the ideal Forum Administrator?:
Someone who consistently interacts with the community, the members are friends and not just ad impressions.

Would you ever consider yourself an expert in the field of running a forum?:
I think I'm good at running forums, and I know the software I use inside and out, I develop for it, I support it, I've worked with it for years now. I've helped others with other software in the past, I'm just good with software.

What are your top five technology MUST-HAVE’s in running a forum?:
I'd like to link all my forums together, and I'm sort of starting this process but it needs a lot of code, so that's an essential for me. Code and code knowledge.