Coffeetime Newsletters

DavecUK

Jan 2022

This is our first newsletter, we have been running for just over a month now, forum membership is excellent with 307 members (I have a test account, so I deducted 1 from the total). Activity is good and for the last 3 weeks we have averaged around 160 posts per day, with a peak of almost 200 posts. Considering membership was initially slow to get going, that’s really excellent.

So far we have:

grown the membership
grown the activity
Upset Vertical&*^%$ 🤣
Started to find our feet as a forum
I have submitted us to google, yahoo and bing search, we are starting to climb the rankings as our activity level increases
We have approximately 5 or 6 times more posting activity than the old forum
Settled on the extensions that don’t cause problems
decided on how to handle private messaging

Overall it’s gone very well and thanks to everyone who put up with all the changes as I experimented and got to grips with the administration.

We have some things to decide around the commercial directory function and retailer specific areas. I have checked the TOS of freeflarum and although we are well within them, I am not comfortable that we are following the spirit of them. In as much as providing free advertising for Retailers is using a free service to support their profits….even if such profits result in a “possible” discount advantage for members. I’m personally coming around to the view that we should (for coffee related Retail/commercial members):

Remove the commercial directory
Remove retailer specific areas
Retail/Business members should retain commercial against their name (so we know they are businesses
Allow them to take part in discussions, but not to use said discussions as sales pitches
If they want to sell something, or have a great deal for us…they can use classifieds like the rest of us
Unlike non commercial member classifieds, prehaps we should remove commercial members classifieds once the offer has expired?

I need to discuss the above with the other two mods over the coming week or so…but the more I think about it the more comfortable I am with this way forward. It’s important where we have a forum where we can discuss things freely and fairly, without feeling we might upset an “advertiser”. Primarily, this is our forum for our benefit.

Thanks

Dave

P.S. Tell anyone you know who is into coffee about us, hopefully we will still be here, even stronger than ever, if those who have still not transitioned from CFUK finally have enough of a corporate monetising the shit out of them. They don’t pay tax in the UK, care about the community, or it’s raison d’etre, they are definitely not a good thing for lots of forums, who lose their soul in the process.

DavecUK

Feb 2022

Membership continues to rise, perhaps not as quickly as it should, but our search ranking is gradually climbing in the search engines, so we should see more people and the more unwelcome attentions of spammers. The forum is registered with anti-spam sites, and many known spammers are actually automatically prevented from logging on via shared information. So far, we remain spam free.

The forum recently had an update from 1.1.1 to 1.20, a major upgrade and the servers that host us have all had their software upgraded too (php, maria, nginx etc..), I think they added some disk space as well. I have noticed the forum speed has significantly increased since the update. It’s quite snappy now.

I have 1 donation to freeflarum still to take from a member, for the next donation round, so if any of you are thinking of donating, please do it in the next week. I’m considering just opening donation rounds every 3 months, to bundle more of them together.

Another thing that’s great is the engagement with topics that are not just coffee…which is as it should be for any community. People chat about a lot of things over a coffee and I personally find these side discussions rewarding and interesting to read, even if I don’t always have anything to contribute.

Some members have embarked on some great projects, I would like to mention them all but a few are: such as restorations, 3D printed accessories, creating a poor mans decent…I want to see some videos of it in operation and the addition of a drain valve for an Evo…which I think should be standard on all machines!

Activity on the forum remains good and a few days ago we exceeded our previous record for the number of posts in a day…The record now stands at 218 posts!

Crowdfunding - I added an area to discuss these often interesting ideas, coffee related or not.

Not much else I can think of to add for this months newsletter, things have gone well, we have a nice community here and may well pick up a bit more activity during and after Verticalscope migrate CFUK to their standard cookie cutter Xenforo platform, both during the migration, and after they slather it with google ads for everything and anything.

Dave, Patrick and Rob

P.S. I had to change edit time back to 10 minutes…I have raised the issue on the Flarum support forum about editing times.

DavecUK

March 2022

It’s been an interesting month for the forum, lots of interesting subjects, not just coffee, but lots of things we will enjoy a coffee while doing. Reminiscing, Movies, Music, Beer and…….Pizzas. For me it continues to add interest and a community feel.

Membership is rising steadily, we always get 1 or 2 people per day….I think as we grow, the mesh of that net and internet presence will make this increase. Please remember to back link us in your social media accounts, so we become easier to find.

Spam - We have thankfully remained free of spam, considering we are the busiest UK forum, that’s quite incredible. perhaps we’re too stealthy to be noticed, perhaps some of the antispam tools are working better than I thought. In addition we also seem to be free of the incessant retailer spam that appears to be invading another supposedly massive, but deathly quiet forum. I don’t mind retailers becoming part of the conversation here, but they seem to be love bombing the other forum and fighting over who is an authorised reseller and who isn’t. I guess it’s good it’s happening on a forum with very little activity, and not here.

Lelit - There has been a lot of speculation about the corporate takeover and how that will affect machines and support. My personal opinion is, it would be madness to Breville to pay so much money and then kill the business, or change what has made it great. Lelit has done really well by being nimble, innovate and good value for money. They have sold a LOT of machines into the prosumer sector and for good reason, they are great machines. I think Lelit will simply dominate in the real prosumer sector, unless other manufacturers step up…fortunately, most of the ones I know are continuing to innovate.

Donations to Freeflarum - They seem to come in little bits, so I have decided to open a donation round every 3 months, rather than have loads of little payments to deal with. It keeps things a lot easier for me. I have not exactly decided how to do it, but I might use the countdown timer for that, instead of things like easter eggs. It was a test of the system and it seems to work quite well. If you see the donation option on the menu disappear, that will be why.

Forum meet up - I absolutely still want to do this, various projects have got in the way and a potential trip to ECM in Germany is also upcoming, not sure of the dates yet. I have not forgotten and will get some dates together soon. I will be good to see some familiar and not so familiar faces.

That’s it, it’s a quiet Month….enjoy the coffee!

DavecUK

August 2022

Direct donations to Freeflarum have worked well for me, I don’t have to handle the money transfers, nothing is made to me and I have no idea who has donated, just the amount given. This suits me very well as I feel it should be completely anonymous and that even I don’t need to know. It’s also easy and as I am basically lazy, it’s working for me. https://coffeetime.freeflarum.com/d/854-donations-new-process

We had a nice note from one of the main support team guys from Freeflarum, so I thought I would share it here for you all. It is tough for them as I know they struggle to keep the performance as they would like it, so the money helps them. Clearly though, we are making a difference. So thank you to everyone who has donated to them.

Coffeetime to be featured on the main FreeFlarum page(?)

Hi,

first of all, thank you so much for donating to FreeFlarum - your forum has donated the most euros so far, and it’s crazy! I wanted to contact you for some time now and thank you but I didn’t have the time, so I am doing it in this E-mail now. I am very humbled by your continuous commitment towards helping the FreeFlarum project stay sustainable for a long period of time! Sincerely, thank you for that.

While I can’t do much for your community in return (other than that it will have a special place at FreeFlarum, and also my heart), I am currently reaching out to owners of some of the most successful and awesome FreeFlarum forums.

As you might’ve heard, I am currently re-designing and re-coding a large portion of FreeFlarum. And it’s almost complete. I was just thinking of featuring some images of a couple of FreeFlarum forums on the FreeFlarum website (otherwise the page looks empty and boring). I am sure that some nice images will make people fall in love with Flarum, and hopefully they will choose it as their forum. This will bring more attention to Flarum, FreeFlarum, and also your forum (I will put a link to your forum under your image, so people can follow that), which means that everyone could benefit from this.

Here’s the current look of the re-designed main page at the development server: https://freeflarum.dev. Some things are still unfinished and in development, but the gallery is pretty much done, and will give you an idea of what I have in mind - I just need some images. I have attached a screenshot of your forum in this E-mail - this could be placed into the showcase for people to see.

I need to ask you if I may use this image of your forum in the gallery at the upcoming FreeFlarum page? I’m looking forward to your response

Obviously I am happy for us to be featured on their main page.

Other news

Membership continues to grow and the post count has stabilised at a reasonably healthy level, which should mean the forum doesn’t die from a lack of interest. I believe we are almost certainly the busiest coffee forum in the UK. As well as probably the best completely non commercial coffee forum 😉 but that’s a Carlsberg “probably”.

The classifieds section is going well, please read the post on how best to place adverts…I see many adverts with the text first, don’t, put the image first and then the image will appear in the new discussions list. Trust me it has more impact.

Moderation: Generally nothing much is required, there is a high level of antispam protection, so we really don’t seem to get any. I get the odd post flagged (thanks), but in general very little work is needed. The biggest PITA is when I am asked to split off bits of a discussion, but that’s not too often. So I want to thank you all for making the community a pleasant place to visit and participate in. Lets keep it friendly and productive, I have seen what happens to a forum when that doesn’t happen.

Definitely check out the knowledgebase and if you’re writing articles, perhaps try and write them there so we can make it more of a resource. It can be tricky to find the nuggets in posts sometimes.

That’s all for this month!