Documenting the development of the VoskCoinTalk cryptocurrency forum

VoskCoin · April 5, 2020, 4:02pm

It’s easy to become obsessed with your goal, and not realize how fun the journey there is. With that in mind, I wanted to start a little thread documenting the casual journey and evolution of this VoskCoinTalk forum. Did the world need another cryptocurrency forum? We don’t think the world just needed another crypto forum, but we think it needed a great forum that we hope will grow to be home of a plethora of useful information, discussions, and guides all surrounding Bitcoin, cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. Will VoskCoinTalk ever take off? We don’t know, but all you can ever do is work hard and hope that what you do create finds use and success.

Before I delve into what has gone into creating the VoskCoinTalk forum and the evolution of it over time, let's quickly review why we are creating the VoskCoinTalk forum and hoping it becomes the best cryptocurrency forum in the world!

Ten years after Bitcoin really kicked off cryptocurrency and blockchain technology there are only four main sources of crypto forums, there’s the OG Bitcointalk that is flooded with junk, spam, and really just a hollow shell of what it used to be, in my opinion.

Then there are dedicated coin forums, for example, Ethereums forum, and Zcash’s forum, this is fine if you’re obsessed with only that project, but these forums are heavily biased and centralized around one single coin/project/topic.

There are subreddits, again heavily focused on a single topic, or so heavily modded you can’t really even share your content. For example on /r/ethereum and /r/ethermining our videos never make it through to their reddits.

Finally, the only other main discussion-based area for cryptocurrency information are Discord servers. While there is certainly a lot more variety with Discord servers, for example, the VoskCoin Discord server discusses anything related to cryptocurrency with a heavy focus/interest on mining – the issue arises from Discord not being open to the internet and great information is quickly buried. It’s actually this exact issue as to why we are here… creating the VoskCoinTalk Discourse forum. In addition to generalized Discord servers like ours, there are plenty of coin/project specific Discord servers, but again you run into the same issue as the dedicated coin forums we discussed above.

So yeah ENOUGH BACKGROUND! We have been trying to create a forum/wiki style site for years now, we explored several options, tried to build some grand sites/designs, ultimately all of the other options were incredibly time consuming as well as quickly became rather expensive. Greerso or @greer was heavily pushing for us to use Discourse in 2018-2019, however, I fought Danny every step of the way…

Ultimately after wasting more time and money, I came crawling back to Greerso and said… Let’s build VoskCoinTalk with Discourse. Personally I am the type of guy who has to fully embrace/be into something in order to put my heart into it, and this time, I am fully embracing Discourse for all it has to offer. This forum has enough function, customizability, and a clean user interface to work for what we want it to do.

Fun fact Greerso actually booted up a Discourse forum for our community in 2018, but unfortunately, I was still against using Discourse and distracted with other projects so it never really materialized.

MOVING FORWARD, In 2020 the cryptocurrency market falls on its face along with the world economy largely in part to Corona Virus Covid-19. General interest is down and everyone is being more stringent with spending, so I think… this is a great time to just crunch out some work that is not video production! This leads to me PMing Greerso informing him, I am once again, asking for his development help lol!

For some reason, Greerso decides to continue to be awesome and help me out. We spin up a server on Digital Ocean, who we both thoroughly enjoy and have always had great results with their VPS’s, if you’d like to support VoskCoin and VoskCoinTalk and need some servers, please use our referral code here! Within about an hour Greerso successfully deployed our Discourse build via Docker on the DO VPS. VoskCoinTalk 2.0 was official born 04/03/2020

Now we have created the bare bones, the next step is the incredibly time-consuming layout,theme,categories and just well the whole forum design. After choosing a basic theme, adjusting some colors, adding our logo, and choosing a basic layout format, here is what the forum looked like on 04/04/2020. While this may not seem like much, it took several hours to make basic adjustments of design and settings.

What’s next for the VoskCoinTalk cryptocurrency forum design you ask?! Categories need proper descriptions in each of them, along with additional categories so when the forum (hopefully) becomes active, all topics and posts will fall into appropriate areas. The idea is that investing more time now will save more time cleaning up and organizing later on with the forum.

As of 04/05/2020 I continue to tweak settings to make VoskCoinTalk a more fluid and enjoyable experience. With most of our community coming from YouTube (Google) and then secondly meshing the forum properly with the VoskCoin Discord server – the ability to login to VoskCoinTalk with Google and Discord is critical for the (hopeful) onboarding of our users and community. I set up both of these to allow sign-up and login today.

04/06/20

Currently waiting on Google to approve our app to allow us to login to VoskCoinTalk via Google, and we discovered the issue that was preventing users from logging in with Discord. Although we had properly set up Discord login on VoskCoinTalk, there was a small error we made on the Discord app side. By removing www. from our redirect URI, Discord login is now fully functional! This also reminded me that people can see the icon that I chose for the app, and that should definitely be updated to the VoskCoin logo instead of a random screenshot of the VoskCoinTalk forum.

Also added Google Analytics to VoskCoinTalk, pretty cool to see all of the detailed information it can provide. My previous SEO experience for websites only included background with Wordpress Jetpack dashboard, Yoast, and some other basic plug-ins for WP.

04/07/20
Still waiting on verification from Google for our Google sign-up/sign-in application, until then I do not believe the Google function will work properly.

In 4 days we have already breached 50 members excluding administrators and moderators, which is super freaking cool. Really appreciate the support and this just adds fuel to the fire to hopefully build this into an awesome cryptocurrency and blockchain resource! I am also exploring how to create a unique badge to award to VoskCoinTalk users that signed-up early in the life of VoskCoinTalk.

To be continued

VoskCoin · April 10, 2020, 3:02pm

Moving forward I’ll make a monthly -> quarterly -> annual?! update on VoskCoinTalk regarding random development. Most new features and updates if anything major would be posted as a new update thread.

I do want to thank the 100+ awesome people that have already joined the VoskCoinTalk forum! As of 04/08/20 we breached 100 members on the VoskCoinTalk forum which is much more than I anticipated in such a short time period, only 3 days after the extremely rough site went live.

VoskCoinTalk as of 04/10/20 is still missing a lot of categories, category descriptions, random information, links, and just a lot more we want to add. Building this forum has been a lot more time consuming than I originally anticipating but thanks to @greer we have been able to knock a ton of that development out within this first week.

Moving forward we are going to be focusing on enhancing the user experience of VoskCoinTalk, added unique features, rewards, and badges, as well as creating unique content that will hopefully encourage more people to join and participate in the VoskCoinTalk forum!

& lastly, here’s a screenshot of VoskCoinTalk on 04/10/20 for the time capsule!

VoskCoin · April 19, 2020, 12:33am

VoskCoinTalk breached 100 members and almost 10,000 pageviews in the first week, which is super cool

Created this forum has been more time consuming than I anticipated, and there are a TON of polishing aspects that still need to be taken care of. Thanks to Greer’s heavy lifting we have kept a good pace on overall deployment and above all… the forum works lol

VoskCoinTalk week 2 was a bit slower, but still consistent numbers which is always a good sign. I have been actively working on increasing VoskCoinTalk’s SEO and have manually submitted some threads for indexing. While a sitemap is apparently not needing, it’s highly recommended for quick and accurate search engine indexing of your site and forum.
We are closing in on 200 members on VoskCoinTalk as well as 20,000 pageviews… I really miss the oldschool hit counter days! I bet there’s some people who will read that sentence… and not even know what that is lol. Anyway thanks to everyone for the continued support and usage of VoskCoinTalk, next stop… 1,000 members and 100,000 views!