There are a couple ways to do the fee-based chatroom. Some people have a simple paypal button (you can create a free paypal account if you don’t already have one and associate it with your email address). We add the button for you. Then when a member pays you through paypal, you can approve their membership in the chatroom, or you can register them yourself and send them the login.

We also have a new subscription add-on where people can first register a username/password, but they are not granted access to the chatroom until they subscribe to the chatroom for a duration you specify, this also uses paypal.

What’s nice is you can experiment with what works best after the room is installed (settings can always be changed).

Other add-ons like secure chat and private messages are also available.

View more about our chat software as well as the current chat add-ons

You can change the Forum Name in Admin -> Server Settings (on the left under Configuration)

Scroll down and you’ll see “Forum Title” where you can change the name

be sure not to change anything else as some of those settings can disable the forum.

We like Dreamweaver a lot because it uses the time-tested and user-approved method of FTP to publish your files. Here’s how to setup your FTP info to publish using Dreamweaver. We’ll pretend our website that we’re publishing to is olicentral.com.
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1. Choose Site > Manage Sites.
2. In the Manage Sites dialog box, either click the New button or select your existing site definition and click the Edit button.
3. From the Advanced tab, choose the Remote Info category on the left.

Use this info:
FTP Host: olicentral.com (replace with your domain)
Login: olicentral (replace with your login ID)
Password: (your password)
Leave everything else default,
** If you need the “Host directory”, use: /www/htdocs/olicentral.com (or contact your support tech for this directory, but generally this can be left blank).

Many of our FTP Hosting clients are transcriptionists who need a private folder to transfer their transcriptions back and forth with clients.
Our FTP Hosting is a popular choice because of the secure web-ftp feature, this allows the transcriptionist to provide their client with a simple browser-based FTP login that requires just a username and password to access.
Once logged in the client can upload voice files, for example, which the transcriptionist then downloads and transcribes. Then the transcriptionists uploads the finished files, which the client can then download and have a type-written copy of their work.
There are many other uses but this is just one way our clients use our FTP Hosting service.
Happy transcribing!

Web-FTP is great in its ease of access and use, but it is designed for more lightweight tasks. When you need to do some heavy-lifting (files larger than 200mb, or a lot of files) then you’re much better off using regular FTP software, or your browsers built-in FTP access (if it has it).

Here’s a couple ideas for OLI’s FTP Hosting customers:

Some versions of Internet Explorer allow you to connect directly using ftp://username@hostname — for example ftp://your-name@your-subdomain.oli.us

-then enter your password — some browsers allow dragging and dropping of files to transfer that way.

- note this is not an encrypted session, if you need that, see below.

- Firewalls, browser versions and other issues can determine if you can use technique, if not, see below

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Regular FTP Software
CoreFTP is the one we like best for PC users (for Mac it’s Cyberduck),. You can drag and drop files from the server and visa-versa. Download CoreFTP here:
http://www.coreftp.com/download.html

Here’s how to connect:
http://www.coreftp.com/doc
For “Host / IP / URL” use (for example): your-subdomain.oli.us
then enter your username and password, everything else can be left as is unless you also need to encrypt the session, then check the SSH/SFTP box in your site profile.

Then click “Connect” and you can drag and drop files into the remote server window which appears on the right (your computer files are on the left side)

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One other great FTP and SFTP application is Filezilla, d0wnload and docs are here.

If you’d rather archive old forum posts than delete them (instead of deleting them permanently) then yu can create a special archive board and move old topics there.

First in Admin -> Boards you create a new board called “Archive” and unclick the appropriate boxes to make it viewable only by Administrators. Then to move a topic you click on the topic to move and scroll to the bottom of the page, on the left you’ll see a “Move Topic” button, click that and select to have it moved to the new Archive board.

We host SMF via our Forum Hosting service.

OLI is pleased to announce our Moderated Chat Software is newly updated to make it even easier to host a moderated chat with a guest speaker. You can allow audience members to enter the chatroom — by first registering or we can set it to allow immediate access — and once inside the chatroom they can submit messages that only the moderator (you) can see. You then simply click a button that says “Post” to post the message to everyone in the chatroom. This ensures only good comments and questions (that you pre-approve) appear in the chatroom.

You can also have a Guest Speaker who can answer approved messages as well as post responeses live (without needing approval). Feel free to try the live demo Here.

Mods, or modifications, are forum add-ons that can being more functionality of fun to your forum.

There are plenty of mods available at the the official SMF mod site here:
http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/

First download the Mod you want by right-clicking the .zip link on the mod’s page and choose “Save Target As…” or “Save Link As…” Save the .zip file to your desktop.

The go to your Forum and click the Admin tab and click Packages on the left (under Main) then click the “Download Packages” tab near middle of screen

Scroll down and click “Browse” next to “Package to Upload” and find the downloaded .zip file of the Mod on your computer

Then click “Apply Mod” on the lower right of the page

Make sure the tests look good and if so click “Install Now”

Then look through your Admin area for the new links of tab to control the Mod, often around or within the Features and Options link, or check the support link where you downloaded the Mod for more details.

We advise making a backup of your forum before installing mods, and also not installing too many mods as some conflict with each other.

Enjoy the new functionality of your forum hosting!

1. Choose a niche for your Forum, in our experience forums with too broad of a topic don’t take off as well as targeted a topic for a specific group of people.

2. Choose good forum software, that has a whole community of people helping with update, like Simple Machines (SMF).

3. Choose a good affordable yet professional Forum Hosting company, naturally we recommend OLI and yes we host SMF

4. Drive traffic to the forum, here’s some good Forum Promotion tips

5. Setup ads on the Forum that aren’t too intrusive to your forum members, like Google Adsense. A nice tool for SMF is the Ad Management mod that allows you to add ads to certain boards, within posts, etc.

of course results vary but there are some tips to get you started

There is a setting in Simple Machines Forums (the forum software we host) that will allow you to also show the most recent topics (posts) on the opening page. It won’t show every single topic posted (otherwise there would be too many when the forum grew to 1000 posts) but it will let you display the most recent topics, and you can choose how many to show.

Here is how to have the most recent posts display on the forum index page (the opening page):

Go to Admin -> Current Theme  (under “Configuration” on the left) -> then scroll down and change the “Number of recent posts to display on board index” setting to 25, or 50, or however many topics (posts) you’d like to show.