Into The Forrst

A quick note about Promoted Posts.

When we launched Promoted Posts back in December, we had no idea they’d become so popular so quickly. (Un)fortunately, that put us in an interesting position where the initial system we’d built quickly became inundated with posts — a good problem to have, certainly, but not necessarily for our users. We’ve been working extremely diligently over the past few weeks to re-architect the system to much better handle the amount of posts coming through. To that end, we’ve temporarily disabled promoting new posts — existing posts will still run normally.

The new system works a bit differently: you purchase Acorns and hit “Promote” as usual, but now your post will enter a queue. It’s designed to ensure that only a limited amount of posts run at any given time, and as one post drops out of rotation, a new post takes its place. We’ll soon have enough data to show you exactly where you are in the queue, and when you can expect your post to go live. It’s a first in, first out kind of system.

So, for now, we need to focus on clearing the existing queue before we enable promoting new posts again. When the new system is ready, we’ll turn promotion back on. There will also be a way to “double down” to jump the line — for extra Acorns, you’ll be able to move your post to the front; great for posts that are time-sensitive.

I’ll also be crediting all users whose posts are in the backlog with Acorns commensurate with the amount they initially purchased. I realize that it’s a small show of our apologies, and I’m very sorry for any inconvenience caused.

I’m really excited about the new system and I hope to have it fully deployed soon.

Thank you, Kyle

On our recent changes to the Forrst Guidelines.

Howdy, folks. As of this morning, there are a few notable changes to the Forrst Guidelines I wanted to mention briefly.

Be proud of your posts. Please don’t post just for the sake of posting, or post things like “I was bored, LOL”. When commenting, try to say more than just “Great” or “Hate it”; the more thorough your feedback, the more reputation you’ll earn.

We clarified this guideline quite a bit, specifically in terms of one of the reasons why folks should provide thorough feedback.

Posts should have detailed titles and descriptions, and be well-formatted so other Forrsters have a clear idea about what they’re looking at. Also, teaser posts are fine, but photos of your screen or extreme crops are better posted elsewhere.

We added the bolded part — while it’s always fun to hint at that next big project you’re working on, we’d like to steer clear of the Forrst ecosystem becoming one too cluttered with low-context teaser shots and photos of screens.

Your posts and comments should be written with proper spelling, capitalization, and punctuation. In general, try to write things on Forrst as you’d write things to your clients or your employer.

This one’s brand new — Forrst is a community of both professional developers and designers, as well as up-and-coming talent. We previously didn’t mention anything about post and comment formatting, but the community has grown to the point where we’ve been seeing more than a few instances of posts or comments with good intent but poor formatting. We know not everyone’s the greatest writer (ourselves included), but we do feel that Forrst content can and should be on par with how you’d write a client or employer — properly formatted, no txt speak, and so forth.

We also updated the list of posts that probably aren’t a good fit for Forrst:

iOS homescreens and mods, work- and deskspaces, desktops, or desktop wallpaper

Desktop wallpaper and iOS mods, while certainly interesting, have tended to lead to terse posts without much detail behind the work. We also feel that there are better communities devoted more to customization, e.g. DeviantArt (of which we’re a big fan).

All in all, I’m really proud of how the Forrst community has continued to evolve and grow, and I feel our guidelines have played an important role in that. I appreciate the time you’ve taken to read the new guidelines, as well as our brief summary of changes above. If you have any questions, feel free to email me directly: kyle at forrst.com.

Thanks,
Kyle

Forrst: One Year Later

I thought it would be fun to do a quick post in honor of Forrst recently having its first birthday. Coincidentally, our birthday falls in January, which means I can be exceptionally lazy and combine “happy birthday to us” and “year in review” posts into one.

Now, without further ado, here it is.

Some interesting numbers since going online in January 2010, one year ago:

• 1,795,891 unique visitors came to Forrst
• 10,440,376 pages have been viewed
• users have spent the equivalent of 22.881 years on the site
• we grew to 21,024 registered users
• of those users, in a given month around 7,500 create content (that’s almost 36%!)
• there are 51,889 posts, with 411,651 likes and 182,090 comments
• at any given time, roughly 10,000 people are waiting for an invitation (we need to help get them in a bit faster; some have been waiting for months)
• any given day, users generate around 7,000 unique pieces of activity data
• there are between 250 and 400 users using Forrst at any given time

What a year it’s been! I had no idea that what started out as a tiny side project would evolve into a vibrant community. Other notables for 2010, and some of what’s in store for 2011:

• Gary Vaynerchuk invested a seed round in March and Forrst officially became a full-time project for me
• we decided to raise a small angel round, and Dave McClure joined as an investor in late December (NB: the round isn’t fully subscribed yet)
• Forrst gained its first two employees, Zack and Mike (both Forrst users)
• we launched The Cabin, a weekly deal feature
• we went through three major iterations of our UI and site architecture
• we were written about or mentioned multiple times in Observer, Smashing Magazine, Think Vitamin, Mashable, Techcrunch, SEOmoz, and many other blogs
• we launched Promoted Posts and on-site credits, Acorns
• finally, we worked with the excellent Pasquale and Adam

Coming in 2011:

• We launched Forrst.me into beta
• We have been invited to work out of Dogpatch Labs NYC (Thanks Peter, Matt, and crew!)
• The Cabin relaunched in partnership with AppSumo
• We’re rolling out a job board powered by Behance’s job network
• We announced Supporter accounts, and started accepting pre-registrations — over 500 members signed up in less than 24 hours

There’s a bunch more we’ve got in store for the product this year, including welcoming a designer to the team, helping members more easily collaborate, building a better notifications system, more partnerships, and so much more. There are also plans to really start exploring the ways Forrst can become a powerful business, through the job and recruitment avenues, our Supporter accounts, and so forth.

I realize that this post doesn’t fully do Forrst justice since so many incredible things came to pass last year that are difficult to properly convey, but I hope it provides a glimpse into the amazing journey I and the community have had. Thanks so much.

On Reputation.

There has been some chatter around Forrst and IRC lately about reputation, so we thought we’d take a moment to write up exactly what reputation “is.”

The reputation system is in place to ensure the Forrst is filled with quality content. Just about every action that you do on Forrst in someway contributes to your reputation score. However, you are not the only one that can affect your reputation score, which should explain why your score can change over night and in periods of inactivity. And remember, every action you do also affects the person who invited you.

Thought out comments are encouraged, and un-constructive comments are discouraged. Other than that, don’t worry too much about reputation, and just be an active and constructive member. It’s more a way for us to watch and reward great contributors than it is any kind of competition.

We’ve designed the system from the ground up to help prevent users trying to game the system, and several checks are in place to ensure that things like just liking every post that you come across won’t give you an unfair advantage.

Currently, invites are handed out based on your reputation (thought we realize we may need to tweak the balance a bit), and we have several other things in the works that are going to require various reputation scores.

Feel free to email zack at forrst.com if you feel that there is an error or bug in the system, or with any other thoughts or concerns, and I will try to shed some light on the situation.

Forrst v3, one week later.

Hard to believe that Forrst v3 launched a mere seven days ago. We’re extremely proud of the product and community we’ve built, and wanted to share a few updates since launch.

Fixes and Support

We’ve rolled out literally dozens of bugfixes and subtle tweaks since launch. You should rarely, if ever, come across our dear friend, Error Bear, but if you do, rest assured we’ll fix it in short order. By popular demand, we brought back a unified popular posts feed. Also, we know our Uservoice isn’t getting the attention it deserves, and we’re currently looking at ways to roll a support system into Forrst in a more integrated fashion, since many folks are sharing their support issues directly on the site. Ultimately, we’d love to figure out a way to leverage the site and community for such issues.

Promoted Posts

We’ve been amazed at the positive response to our new Promoted Posts system and our site credits, Acorns. To date, we’ve already seen dozens of awesome promoted posts, with some great response. The guys at Skills wrote a neat blog post about their experience so far. If you’re interested in reading more, check out the FAQ or head over to snag a few Acorns and give it a shot for yourself.

Introducing Reputation

Zack has been working extremely hard implementing a very robust reputation system for Forrst. While young, we feel that it’s already an excellent way to see who’s going above and beyond contributing to the community. Every single action you take on Forrst contributes to your reputation score (either positively or negatively). This includes, posting, liking posts and comments, flagging content that goes against the guidelines, and most importantly contributing thoughtful, helpful critique through commenting. While we can’t give away our secret sauce, it’s safe to say that “great work” type comments are worth substantially less than a well thought-out response. I’m looking forward to watching the system mature, and I’m confident it’s going to play a big role in Forrst.

What’s Next

Over the next month, we plan to roll out JSFiddle integration for code posts, premium user profiles/Forrst Pro, continue to iterate on the user experience, especially onboarding of new users, and so much more. We know there are some confusing aspects of the stream (comment vs. post liking, missing important context, etc.). The Snaps landing page could use some love, and we’re also aiming to make sharing code so much more useful.

As always, any questions or concerns please email hello AT forrst.com. Thanks for your continued support!

The New Forrst

I am extremely proud to announce that version 3 of Forrst has officially launched today. It is the culmination of more than three months of hard work and almost a year of learnings, not to mention the hundreds (if not thousands) of emails and posts from our community filled with suggestions, praise, bug reports, and critique. I’d like to share some of the highlights of Forrst v3, give a few updates about the team, and briefly talk about what the next year has in store.

What’s New

Here’s a list of some of the bigger changes in v3:

• Perhaps two of the most exciting new features to come to Forrst are Promoted Posts and a new credit system, called Acorns. Promoted Posts allow any Forrst member in good standing get their posts in front of thousands of active Forrst members (great for job posts, requests for urgent feedback, or promoting a new product or service). Acorns are used by Promoted Posts, as well as a few things coming over the next few months, and are available for purchase now at: http://forrst.com/purchases More information about Promoted Posts may be found here: http://forrst.com/faq#s-promoted_posts

• There’s a brand new homepage, courtesy of Mr. Keith Holjencin. While we absolutely loved the old homepage (get nostalgic here: http://cl.ly/3o3D1F1n2B0W0t3P1W0e), it just wasn’t doing the community justice; it didn’t really paint a clear picture of what Forrst was about in a way that anyone could quickly consume when coming to the site for the first time. The new homepage gives a peek into some of the great content being shared on the site, highlights members’ own stories about how Forrst has been a great asset in their careers, and also provides answers to commonly asked questions about being invited to join. Head to http://forrst.com/ and log out to see the new homepage in action.

• Post pages have also been completely redesigned to be wider and less cluttered; snaps and code finally aren’t limited to a few hundred pixels wide. We have refined and polished dozens of aspects of the UI and user experience, including removing the heavy dependency on images for UI chrome, instead relying on pure CSS wherever possible. Requests now require far fewer images, and we’ve also rewritten our asset packager to serve a single file each for our JS and CSS. There’s a brand new navigation system, which let us eliminate a subnav bar, instead relying on a simpler menu system (which is also pure CSS, we might add). Check out the new UI: http://forrst.com/

• The Forrst architecture has been completely rewritten from the ground up so that we’re not only able to offer a faster, more stable experience (each request uses an order of magnitude less memory and some pages are up to 75% faster), but we’re also able to build new features more quickly and with less code. All of this has been accomplished with a new PHP5 framework written in-house, called Magnus. Our goal is to open-source Magnus sometime in 2011.

• We’ve rewritten the Markdown-based library that handles formatting posts and comments so that it’s more predictable and less annoying (trust us, we feel your pain about it!) We have also built a slew of moderation tools (Hi, Mike!) that let our community manager and moderators do their job more quickly and in a more automated fashion (don’t worry, you’ll still receive emails from a real human if we’ve got to contact you for any reason).

• Every bit of code on Forrst, whether in a post or comment, has a new “Raw” link that provides a way to quickly view and copy that code. We’re also planning on integrating with popular code snippet sharing services, such as JSFiddle, Pastie, and GitHub’s Gist.

• Some other highlights: Activity Streams now more correctly remember where you were when you last left off (no more broken Back button), you can like comments right from the stream (no more leaving the page), there’s finally a FAQ! (http://forrst.com/faq), you can now post drafts of posts, there’s a brand new ad system (crafted by Mr. Zack Kitzmiller) that lays the groundwork for a fully self-serve system sometime in the future, and finally, people lists are now displayed in a more clear, “card” style: http://forrst.com/people/list/developers

While this list only touches on some of the more prominent features of the new Forrst, there’s a ton more we haven’t shared here. Head over to Forrst and have a look for yourself. We’re so proud of it, and we hope you love the new stuff: http://forrst.com/

We’re Growing

It’s an exciting time for Forrst, LLC, too: I’m pleased to welcome Zack Kitzmiller and Mike Evans to the team. Zack is joining me on the dev side, and Mike is coming on as our full-time Community Manager and Official Podcast Maker Guy (he was previously helping part-time). I’d also like to extend a hearty thanks to Keith Holjencin, who has been pushing pixels for Forrst from time to time and is responsible for the UI realignment in v3. It’s been an honor to work with these folks on Forrst, and I’m looking forward to having them all on board for the long haul.

The Future

It’s hard to believe Forrst is almost a year old already. It seems like just yesterday I fired up TextMate and wrote the first lines of what would become Forrst v1. I’m so grateful to our community for being as awesome as they are. Without you guys, Forrst would be nothing. It’s been amazing to see how far things have come. I’m looking forward to the next year; it’s going to be an exciting one! We’ve also got plans to keep building the Forrst community and product (including some neat premium features coming in January), as well as to look at ways we can grow Forrst the brand as well (other verticals, a private product for Teams, and so forth).

Thank You

That about wraps things up. I urge you to check out the new Forrst for yourself: http://forrst.com/ I’d love to hear any and all feedback you’ve got; there’s a Contact link at the bottom of every page. I’d also like to thank the Forrst community at large, our beta testers who managed to break every last bit of v3, Gary and AJ Vaynerchuk for believing in me and in Forrst early on, as well as the numerous folks (Brooke, Nate, Spencer, Jacob, Brady, Dave, Chrissie, and others) who’ve offered guidance and support while we’ve built something great. Thank you.

— Kyle Bragger, Founder & Lead Developer

(Also, the related HN Discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2024651)

A quick note on the Forrst Guidelines

I’d like to take a moment to go into a bit of detail regarding one of the Forrst guidelines, as it seems to be one of the most frequently overlooked on Forrst:

Posts should have detailed titles and descriptions, and be well-formatted so other Forrsters have a clear idea about what they’re looking at.

We ask that all posts have clear, thoughtful descriptions and that they are well-formatted (i.e. full sentences, proper punctuation, and so forth). Taking a few extra minutes to make sure you’ve provided a detailed description and a well-formatted post shows that you care about what you’re sharing, and that you’re keen on making sure other Forrsters can follow along with your posts. Posts that lack any kind of description tend to not create much meaningful discussion, as there’s only so much to be said about posts like “I was bored”, “Just some code”, or “Icons.” We’re starting to be more assertive about enforcing this guideline, so I wanted to address it before hand and to give a heads-up.

We’d really appreciate it if you’d also take the time to review the guidelines, as they’ve recently been updated.

Thanks so much, and please feel free to email with any questions: kyle at forrst dot com.

-Kyle

You should follow Forrst on Twitter here.