[May 2008] BOTM Nomination Thread

This is the nomination thread for Board of the Month of May 2008.

Please note the BOTM Rules here:
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/info.php?do=botm

Nominations will be accepted until the 30th of April.

When nominating please post the site name, URL to the forum, a short description what makes your board stand out from default vBulletin, and a reason for nomination that will motivate others to second the nomination. If the staff feels that a nomination post is too promotional it will be edited accordingly.

Any sites without a name, URL, description and reason for nomination will NOT be entered into the poll. Please ensure that your nomination is in the format:

Quote:
Originally Posted by Sample Nomination
Site Name: vBulletin.org
URL: www.vbulletin.org - this must be clickable
Description: Official vBulletin Modifications Site
Reason for Nomination: Not Nominated. This is an example nomination.

When seconding sites, please ensure that you use the same post for the maximum of 3 allowed seconds. Any seconds not located in your first seconding post will not be counted. Please also ensure that you quote the nomination post you are seconding in your post (Use Multi-Quote Option if you are nomination multiple boards). If there is no name or URL provided then the post will be ignored when the nominations are counted.

Also, please make sure that you are seconding a forum that has already been nominated by its forum owner. Any seconds for a forum that has not been nominated yet will be counted as null and void.

Please posts only nominations or seconds, no "Thank you" posts are needed, they clutter the thread and will be deleted.

Any queries regarding the BOTM Contests should be sent via PM to Danny.VBT.

Best of luck to all nominees!

[Magnusson2u]

Site name: S14.net

URL: http://www.s14.net/forums/index.php

Description: S14.net is a website devoted to BMW's "Most Winningest Tour Car," The E30 M3
(Production 1886-1992). Our main goal is to unite and educate our international membership.
Though we suffer the same frustrations as any website, we have a zero banning policy for our
membership. We are a not for profit site, with zero banner ads, and totally funded by our members.

Reason for Nomination: We wanted to celebrate and share our visual voice with the community
that has assisted in it's development. The add-ons and template modifications allow us to achieve an
appearance and set of functions that we would never be able to
create by ourselves (well beyond our imagination) . "We're car guys."

Good Luck!

[kjhkjh]

Site Name: London Student Forums

URL: http://www.LondonStudent.co.uk

Description: London Student Forums is the online meeting place for students at over 30 universities across London (as well as the several hundred colleges, academies and even English language schools). By many approximations thats a niche target audience of over 300,000 students across London, UK.

We help students to buy, sell and trade text books, as well as find student housing and jobs.
There are individual university forums which are starting to thrive with discussion by attending students and potential students who may still be at high school, but who are wanting help to choose a university. At LondonStudent.co.uk they can just ask their questions in the forums.

One of the coolest mods/hacks to the board is a FREE SMS text message service. Registered users can send a FREE text message to their friends anywhere in the world. This does have a cost to the website (because messages are sent via an sms gateway service provider) but we allow a quota of text messages each day (see the FREE SMS icon at the top right of the London Student Forums website)

Other nice features are the arcade and the London events calendar which is starting to thrive.


Reason for Nomination: This board is truly unique in that it's focus is on students in London, UK - and students across the world who may be thinking of coming to London to study. We have a nice niche and are happy to be filling a void where over 300,000 students weren't previously being covered under a single site.

The style and layout of the site is also unique. The header used across all pages including the custom pages is very different to the usual vBulletin skins and headers. Please take a look and hopefully you'll see us fit for nomination

Our classifieds are starting to draw in many people looking to list their items. LondonStudent.co.uk has recently had a face list and it would be great if someone would second this nomination - it would be a nice boost for me and all the other mods who have been working very hard recently - and it would build on the momentum since our redesign and relaunch.

Thanks and good luck !

[atrljoe]

Site Name: ATRL.net
URL: http://www.atrl.net
Description: An interactive music community built on the #1 fan site for MTV's TRL, where you can discover and share the latest news, charts, and videos, discuss topics, read and create blogs, make requests on personal music countdowns, and participate in tournaments.

Reason for Nomination: We have put thousands of hours of making the styles, custom hacks, file edits, and other tweak to bring together the perfect place for music fans to get together and talk about anything and everything. We started out as a small site with less than 100 active users and now have almost 1000 active users with just over 5000 users registered. Today our members are proud to be a member of the site. Originally we based around the MTV show TRL, and have grown to expand a wide variety of music, movies, and current events. Even prior to the release of Vbulletin Blog we created our own way to blog, and have made several enhancements to the vbulletin code that works beautifully. The Styles alone have taken many man hours of careful tweaking and changing to bring a visually pleasing style that all users love. With different colors to choose from anyone can choose what ever color they want.

Thanks

[tschai]

Site Name: VoetbalPortaal.nl
URL: VoetbalPortaal.nl
Description: Exclusive Dutch-Turkish soccerforum. It's a niche forum actually. It's about football/soccer in Dutch, mainly by and for Turkish people... speaking Dutch. Go figure!
Reason for Nomination: Exclusive, Unique...and balls!

Why VoetbalPortaal.nl stands out of the crowd? Top 10 reasons:

1. Original and unique: the 'clean and fresh' template is fully custom and is made in sparetime. Almost every button, icon and other grafx is customized aka replaced by a famfamfam-icon.
2. Exclusive: free registration, but you're expected to fully participate. We dare to choose for quality instead of quantity!
3. Delicate balance besteen Web 2.0 and old-skool-forum: I wanted all the Web 2.0 goodies, my members were just happy with vBulltein default install
4. Ad-free: for logged in users, that is...
5. Dymamic headers: every (sub)forum has it's own forumheader
6. Iconized: Every category has it's own slik and distinguising icon
7. Optimal (re-)use of navbits: on forumhome and vBA, the navbar is reserved for a banner
8. SEO'd: actually only manually, without vBSEO of ZOINT SEO
9. vB-Optimized: every unused whitespace and built-in function (like forumjump) stripped
10. A 'clean and healthy' community: on regular basis we clean up our userbase. No-posters, double-accounts and pain in the asses are removed. That's why our record was just 300 users and we've kicked out a bunch of them!

Links to some pages:
Main page/vBadvanced portal
Forumhome
Hall of Fame: the Awards page
A random topic

PS: The Beta in the version number is not a Web 2.0 feature; it's really in beta and it's not perfect at all...yet!

PS: The site is currently only optimized for Firefox...

[Pinten1337]

Site Name: Nordisk.nu
URL: http://www.nordisk.nu/
Description: Portal for nordic culture, identity and tradition

Reason for Nomination: Offical Launch date was April 18th 2007. Really nice portal

[funrun]

Site Name: Heroscapers.com
URL: www.heroscapers.com
Description: The Heroscape board game's semi-official fan site
Reason for Nomination: I said "semi-official" because we did such a good job with this site that Wizards of the Coast (big-time board game company) is working with us to make our site the place for Heroscape fans online, as evidenced by 4 of their employees being officially-recognized site members (purple usernames).

Take one glance at the link and you will understand the list of customizations would be too long to write down, but here are some major ones:

• Professional-looking custom graphic theme, post icons, and page layout that is consistent throughout all areas of the site (blog, calendar, etc.). Also important to note our branding compliments the branding of the board game the site is dedicated to, without infringing on the board game's copyrighted material.
• Converted and merged 5 separate databases into 1 unified log-in VB site* (formerly was phpBB, Coppermine, WordPress, a separate downloads database, and separate Calendar database)!
• Auto-rotating header image displays a fresh image every time a new page is loaded.
• Custom design and functionality of the templates controlling the global and forum navigation bars, postbit, header, footer, and all major areas of the site.
• "Wide" page layout template option lets users choose a fixed or dynamic width page without loss of the professional graphic look.
• Custom BBcodes added to embed YouTube videos, Flash, and a "spoiler alert" box that automatically hides your text until the user clicks a button to show the spoiler.
• Entire site is run and operated by volunteers; no one was paid for the hundreds of hours that went into making this a custom VB site!!!
• *This vB version of the previous site was launched Apr. 13, 2008.

[Ciderhelm]

Site Name: TankSpot
URL: http://www.tankspot.com/forums/
Description: TankSpot is a World of Warcraft niche fansite which covers MMO tanking and guild management.
Reason for Nomination: Clean, unique design and navigation; integration of a variety of popular modifications.

[SHANE-D-PAIN]

Site Name: Teen Forums
URL: http://www.teenageforums.com
Description: Online Teen Peer Advice and Discussion Community
Reason for Nomination: The fact that the sole purpose of the website being that it offers a place for Teens to look for solace in each other?
The Design.
Functionability

[StonePilot]

Site Name: GMTruckClub.com
URL: www.gmtruckclub.com
Description: Peer-to-peer Automobile enthusiast community
Reason for Nomination: It's been a pleasure to run this site for nearly 4 years.

• User to user support is great, everyone pitches in from fidning parts to wiring diagrams.
• No drama or flaming - just hasn't been an issue here. Everyone is treated with respect.
• Dramatic growth. Site has quadrupled in the past year.
• Using native vBulletin capabilities to establish strong community.
• Great looking style and formatting!

[Chewy954]

Site Name: Cheating Network

URL: http://CheatingNetwork.net

Description: Cheating Network is your best source online to get free stuff from cash to prizes with little to no work. We attempt to cheat at every site possible to take advantage off in any way that we can.

Reason for Nomination:

• We are unique!
• Not many sites in this particular niche!
• Active forum and growing!
• Great community!
• We help you benefit!

Thanks
-Chewy