LandlordMax Discussion Forums are Open
After a long hiatus, we’ve just re-opened the discussion forum at LandlordMax today. It’s very exciting in that our customers will now not only be able to communicate directly with us, but with each other as well. Fellow LandlordMax’ers will be able to talk to each other, to share ideas, to basically also be able to help each. It’s very exciting!
So please don’t hesitate to take a look and write a message yourself. Maybe even be one of the first to start a new topic. Before long it will be filled with a lots of discussions and many different topics.
And thank you Ian for the great Forum software that’s part of HelpSpot. I don’t know what we’d do without it here. It’s a great product which I recommend to anyone looking for an online help desk support system.
· August 12th, 2007 · 8:33 pm · Permalink
Thanks Steph!
· August 13th, 2007 · 1:43 am · Permalink
That’s great news. Why did you shut the forum down before the “long hiatus”? I’m probably going to be adding a forum to my own site shortly also, so I’m interested to watch how yours grows on LandlordMax.
Justin
· August 13th, 2007 · 8:36 pm · Permalink
Hi Ian,
You’re welcome. I can’t say enough about how positive an experience it’s been. I’m anxiously waiting for version 2 🙂
· August 13th, 2007 · 8:42 pm · Permalink
Hi Justin,
Thank you.
As for why, I was trying to be somewhat sneaky and allude to the reason. But since you ask and I’m generally pretty transparent, and because I’ve posted the full reason before I’ll post it here.
To quote a previous blog entry (and please remember this is before we started using HelpSpot which should greatly help alleviate this issue):
“There used to be a discussion board on LandlordMax, but unfortunately we had to take it down. We started to get bombarded with negative comment FROM ONE OF OUR COMPETITORS! I won’t go into details or mention names but what I’ll say is that the forum software we used tracked IP addresses as people posted. We didn’t know this until after when we wanted to investigate the source of the postings. Because of this we were easily able to pinpoint it to one location. Shame on them!!! We conferred with a lawyer who advised us to just remove the discussion board for now, that it wasn’t worth the litigation. So because of a few bad apples we had to remove it.”
What I also didn’t mention is that we did moderate it for a while but it got really frustrating. To say the least, it became more than annoying to continually (on a daily basis) have to delete postings. They kept appearing because the spam filters weren’t picking them up. Some honest people would respond to the posting, some asking for follow-up’s, etc.
Basically this one company was completely polluting our forums with bad publicity and there was nothing we could other than to daily delete their postings. This time we’re better prepared!!!
· August 13th, 2007 · 9:17 pm · Permalink
Interesting story – thanks for the explanation.
· August 14th, 2007 · 8:07 am · Permalink
Hi Justin,
It actually escalated a little bit more than I initially posted as well. At some point they started to get pretty bold and posted comments such as: xxx sucks, you should instead use xxx. Near the end they stopped trying to conceal who they were.
But like I said before, this time we’re prepared and we’ll deal with it accordingly if they try again. It was just one company after all…
· November 30th, 2007 · 3:21 pm · Permalink
The software is written by our help support system provider. We skinned/themed it ourselves. Overall it’s a great combination of the two.
· August 25th, 2008 · 3:20 am · Permalink
Is this gonna end someday??
· August 25th, 2008 · 9:42 pm · Permalink
I sure hope so. But if not, we’re ready this time!