Major Additions - Synergy by Zoints - A system like Digg integrated into forums.

Index

Installation and Upgrading
FAQ, Changelog and Troubleshooting
Pre-written threads

This plugin is not currently available for vBulletin 3.7.x. Several users have reported serious incompatibilities, and we would not suggest attempting to install it on a forum running 3.7.x at this time.

Foreward

Awhile back, two visionaries by the names of Sal Collaziano and George B realized that a Digg-like system for forums could be highly beneficial. Kudos to those two for their understanding that by working together, we can all benefit.

What is Synergy?

How often does this happen to you? You or a member write a great thread, Google indexes it a week later, but it is buried in the search results so the masses never end up reading it. Frustrating, isn't it? Zoints solves this by taking a system like Digg, then integrating and mirroring in across all forums in a manner that allows great threads to be read by the masses. Synergy is designed to bring you more traffic and inspire your members to create higher quality content in order to obtain "Top Author" status.

Demos (with forums like these using Synergy, you're sure to get some traffic)

You'll notice all the demos look virtually the same except for the skins. This is due to the system mirroring itself across the forums. When a link is clicked, it takes the reader to the originating forum.

Ubuntu Forums
NASIOC
ThumperTalk
LWS


How Synergy Works

You have a lot of high quality threads on your forum. When you (or a trusted usergroup member you permission via the admincp options) decides a thread is worthy of Synergy, you select the "Add to Synergy" link as seen below.




During the next step, you write a short description for the thread and select which category it should go into.




Your thread is then added to a queue on your forum. Once every X hours, the top thread in your queue is added to Synergy.




When your thread is added to Synergy, the system distributes the link and description you wrote to all participating forums. If someone on any forum around the net clicks on your thread link, they are redirected back to your forum to the actual thread so they can read it. If people like your thread, they can vote on it which ranks it higher. Higher ranked threads, especially those that make it to the front page will in turn bring you more traffic.




The admincp settings are as follows:




Proof of Traffic

If you submit good content to Synergy that gets to the front page, you WILL get a lot of traffic. The following screenshot is from a small forum early in our testing. Guess which day it got a thread on the front page?



As more forums join Synergy, more and more people will be reading your threads. Let's work together to remove our reliance on search engines to send us traffic. Our communities are full of great content, it's time for it to be read!

[tormodg]

Very exiting addition. I would love to have a local variant though!

[ubuntu-geek]

Originally Posted by tormodg

Very exiting addition. I would love to have a local variant though!

It is possible to only show articles from your local site. When on the zoints page just choose the "Show only threads from this forum" from the options link.

[RobParker]

Very very cool.

We run a football (soccer) website which obviously fits into Sports but are there any plans in the future to narrow down the categories with sub-categories? Mixing football with what I'm sure will be a heavily US influenced category with American Football, Baseball, Basketball, etc might not work that great for us. Having said that I definitely want to give this a try as the potential is huge.

[RobParker]

Also I'm not sure if this is the case or not but is there a "read only" type system available? Say for people with a website but no vbulletin forum. Having the ability to put a Synergy page on there to display the news would be great, even if they couldn't submit news themselves.

It looks like you've already killed http://www.dementia.za.net/forums/ with traffic as that forum is down and has the most popular story.

[dlee]

Having an issue. Installed Zoints and created the forum. The forum, called synergy at www.potatowned.com is obviously going to the wrong place. When you click on it, it goes to http://www.potatowned.com/forumdisplay.php?f=18 which is a broken link. Any ideas? I'm at a loss on this one...

Thanks,
Dan

[caliman]

David - This mod does not appear to work with VBseo. CLicking on the Synergy forum just redirects to my forum homepage. Please advise.

[tormodg]

Works fine with vBSEO on my forums...

[tormodg]

Originally Posted by ubuntu-geek

It is possible to only show articles from your local site. When on the zoints page just choose the "Show only threads from this forum" from the options link.

Yeah but I would need a completely different set of categories.

It's a great plugin, but customization of the categories would make it brilliant for us.

[caliman]

Originally Posted by tormodg

Works fine with vBSEO on my forums...

Good to know. Hmm... gotta take another look at this.


EDIT - OK. It's confirmed. I am an idiot. (blush) I was missing a slightly important file. Works great!

[Caerydd]

This is absolutely awesome. If I didn't have such a niche forum, I would be totally installing this. I would love a 'digg' style system that was local though, so users can vote up their fav threads in a similar way.

Alleria is full of collaboratively written stories and so on, which would not fit in the majority of those categories. I really need something like

Horror
Romance
Action

etc etc, which users can nominate local threads to, and see in a similar system.

Please note this is not a feature request for this, as I know it is to drive traffic, but it is not entirely suitable for our community, and I would love a 'local' version of synergy.