Mike

Absolutely. I have been doing SEO for over a decade, and for some very large publishers. Despite not being a Notre Dame fan, I am still a college sports fan and it's an industry I know very well. When I saw Domer Domain was for sale, I saw it had a very strong authority in the Notre Dame niche and I saw a lot of potential with it. The website gets a ton of direct traffic from a strong member base (all of you!), and that kind of authority takes years to build up. Here is a high-level plan on what I intend on doing. 1, Make the Blog / Website one of the top 3 places to go for Notre Dame coverage. The domain authority is already here, but the blog was extremely under-utilized. I am looking for Notre Dame-centric writers for content. It's also where Buyer's Guides, etc. will live. But I plan on managing this as a separate entity from the forums. As long as there's a good system in place in terms of rules & moderation, most of efforts will be spent on growing the blog and allowing the forums to continue to operate. I'll constantly be here tweaking, but this is all about the community aspect. 2. Setup the forums to to grow their visibility in Google so more Notre Dame fans / alumni can find them. 3. I also setup a Discord Server. I am not doing anything to Market this right now, but I have it ranking #3 in Google if you search for "notre dame discord". If this is something that shows potential, I'll put some actual effort into this. Forums are becoming less and less relevant with websites such as Reddit growing everyday. But if you have a forum worth visiting, I think they can be salvaged. So although not a Notre Dame fan, I saw tremendous potential with this website, despite being on extremely outdated software. I only get involved with industries I know very well. And I feel I can do a lot to grow the brand. I knew transitioning from Joomla 1.0 to WordPress and moving from vBulletin 3.7 to Invision would be my biggest technical hurdles, so I'm extremely proud that I was able to retain practically everything without much of a problem. And now I can moving forward to finding writers for the blog.

I don't have a lot of options for changes here, but it should be pretty easy to find out if you're signed in or not. If you're on desktop, you should see your username in the top right corner. If you're on mobile, if you click the three lines on the top right corner it will let you know if your signed in or not. I hope this helps

Hi Kelly! Thanks for the introduction! I have dealt with a similar issues on another forum that I'm a frequent reader of. Reader, not much of a poster, for the same reasons. It's important to leave discussions open, but to recognize when it goes from a discussion to a battle that nobody is going to win. I have a couple ideas in mind and how to do combat that, such as a lightly-moderated area where politics and controversial subjects can be discussed. And that is likely where threads that spiral out of control would be sent. But there's not room for a lot of toxicity in the main forums. I'd like to keep that to a minimum. Still not ready to make changes with that yet, but I want to make sure to have some measures in place. I appreciate the feedback, and look forward to getting to know you and other members better

No worries at all! I hope you enjoyed your trip to the beach. It's been too long since I've been to one, and I love the beach. You aren't crazy. I did have ads in the sidebar for Amazon at the time of your post, as I was trying to get things situated. You caught it in the trial and error phase when I was figuring it out what fits. I hate the Amazon ads with a passion. So I agree with your thoughts on the ads. The previous owner used Google Ads, but Google is giving me a hard time right now and I'm trying to find a network that will provide the best experience possible, all things considered. Amazon is not it. But is my only option right now. They still exist, but I did bump it to the bottom of the homepage on the forums. So please forgive any changes that may be happening in real-time as I get a feel for what works. When I get back into an ad Network, I will probably need to throw an ad back into to the sidebar because I'm investing a lot into features and functionality (latest being a marketplace / ticket exchange for members). It's just a matter of getting the balance right. I can handle criticism, and welcome it. So I appreciate your feedback, no matter what state of mind you were in ?

Now I'm dying to know what it was ?

As the season draws nearer, I'm hoping to see new people finding the message board. Whether they've been a quiet reader for years, just hopped over from another community, or are new Notre Dame fans/alum, everyone is welcome. There's a great group of regulars here, even if the off-season, so don't hesitate to stop in and say hi!

Now that the redesign is done, I want to encourage anyone to drop in feature requests, or general suggestions here. This isn't a promise that everything will be added, but anything is up for consideration. If there's a poster's idea you're in favor of, make sure you add a 'like' reaction to that poster's message. Feature Requests: Marketplace for members to sell tickets among other Domer Domain users. (Working on)

Hey @ND_JACK! First off, those are some awesome stories! And why selling between other fans is the way to go. About the Marketplace, that's something I have spent some time thinking about, and I have looked into some options. I'm still brainstorming ideas on the best method, but I'm considering a few of the following options. The most logical approach would be to get a license for 'Commerce' + 'Classifieds' on the site, but that's a few hundred dollars a year to keep renewed. If I did go this route, I may require a very small membership fee to have access to the marketplace section, and other VIP sections to have it make sense. I need to put some thought into it, but I do plan on getting something like that in place before the season roles around. Looking into other options as well, too. But stay tuned

It shouldn't require you to sign in every time. But if you have any issues, just let me know and I'll take a look. ?

Great!!! ?

I'm sorry that it's been such a hassle for you. I have read similar issues when researching, specifically with Firefox, which is why I asked. It may be impossible to fix from my end, but would you mind trying this and see if it solves the problem? Sorry again. If it is related to the browser, I'm hoping that this fixes it. If it doesn't, let me know and I will escalate it with the forum developers, but I'm expecting them to say it's a browser or Twitter issue.

What browser are you using?

Yup! It's very easy, actually. Just click the '# Minutes Ago / # Hours Ago" by the username, and you'll jump to the most recent posts Also, made some more changes to how Tweets load. They might take an additional second or two when there's a lot on the page, but I think it's resolved -- at least it's working better on my end.

Following up on this, but can you check and see if there's an improvement? I switched to Cloudflare and enabled some caching options to try and speed up the loading of Tweets. But I might need to buy a more expensive hosting plan. Thanks again for helping me debug this.

Thank you. I'll take a look at it as soon as I can.

Odd. They should be loading like this. I'll take a look next time I'm at the computer and see if there's a change I can make. Any chance you can drop a screenshot?

This was an overhaul of a 13 year old version of vbulletin and a website running Joomla 1.0. It wasn't a minor upgrade and it was a major overhaul that took dozens and dozens of hours and brought everything up to current standards. Using forum software that doesn't even have meta descriptions or page titles, and hasn't been supported in over a decade is not how you grow a brand. have already been doing SEO full time for over a decade, and I will be transparent in my intentions / goals. Number 1 rule for SEO is too have a mobile friendly experience as rank is determined via the mobile rendering of a webpage. Outside of the forums, I have put about another grand into upgrading the forums. I had to buy the vbulletin software upgrade, and choose to buy invision power to transfer instead of just upgrading to the newest version like IE did. I did not need to incur double the cost, but I wanted to give the users what I thought was the best experience possible of the major message boards (vbulletin, xenforo, IPS) I am working with invision power to try and fix embeds that didn't transfer properly I plan on using the blog for monetization purposes. Right now I'm in the hole about $5k and if I can get a little bit of that back, I'm going to try. Figured it was better than asking for donations (which Irish Envy has done and raised over $2k by their userbase which has been supportive). I am not trying to put that on the members of the forum. I am doing everything in my power to make this place look and feel like the place for Notre Dame fans. So no, it wasn't a minor upgrade, but a major overhaul that was absolutely necessary to avoid getting hit by the upcoming Core Web Vitals Google algorithm update coming this spring. Without the update, there's a big chance much of the organic traffic would be lost. Hence the rush job since you want Google to see it's been updated before that update drops, and they have a chance to crawl all your major pages. I'm sorry you feel the way you do about the changes. I am aiming to make this place more lively and doing everything in my power to get there, while being true to the members here.

I lied. I made one last (quick) edition. But I added a 'Dark' theme as well if you prefer. If you look in the Footer on the bottom of the page, you can click Theme and switch to 'Dark' Note: Advanced isn't available as it's an admin-only option / scrapped theme.

I don't plan on making any more major changes for a bit, as I need to catch up on some other projects of mine I put on hold, as well as battle planning on the Domer Domain website (non-forums). Thanks for the patience everyone. I know transitions / change like this isn't always the most fun at first, but I'm hoping with time, the experience is a lot more enjoyable. The only outstanding thing I'm working on is discussions with the forum developers to see if there's a way to fix legacy embeds, like the Tweets that broke. If anybody needs anything in the meantime, send me a PM or respond to this thread and I will get to it. Thanks again!

Got a nifty 'All Posts' button added to the homepage. Click that little dynamic view button (arrow below) and you can see all new posts across the board, or even check the boards (right column) you're interested in (red box below)

Sorry @D Fence. Didn't know that was what you were referring to. Yeah, that was a bug with the transition to the new software. Going forward, it shouldn't be a problem, but I'm working on seeing if there's a way to fix broken ones from previous posts. Thanks for covering, @Big23Head. Didn't realize that's what was being referenced. Thanks ?

Thanks Faith! Also just learned I have the ability to embed a poll from a topic into the sidebar. As you may have noticed (or would, soon!)

I think I know what you mean. In the most simplistic form, the reason for it is most likely to adapt to mobile. Over 50% of people view websites now from a mobile device, and this format easily adapts to both. The previous forum was desktop-only and allowed for much better precision since the design was primarily for PC / Mouse usage.

Woohoo! Glad that worked! You can also right click a picture online and copy then paste here as well. And don't worry. I have a private theme I'm working on that'll make it feel like home (I hope) when it's done. Takes quite a bit of work though so that may take a few weeks. But it won't stay this vanilla.