A Two Forum Solution

Today, we’re announcing the timetable for our forum rollout. When we launched EarlyTerminationFee.me, we hinted that we were going to make discussion the next major emphasis.

We haven’t had forums for years. Quite frankly, we didn’t like any of the options out there. From user management to wireless posting, we found them all to not do a good job.

And, accessing posts wirelessly didn’t help matters either. Are you sick of being prompted to download an app on nearly every message board, with an annoying dialog box for some app called Tapatalk? Yeah, we are too.

Next week, we’ll be launching the return of the PhoneNews.com Forums. They’ll be tightly integrated into PhoneNews.com. We’ve always said that the target audience on PhoneNews.com is to the average joe, but meant to scale up to the most technically informed. We had a big challenge applying this to our forums.

With our old forums, we had some people asking really basic questions – how to reset their devices, how to make plan changes, etc… on the same forum with people that were asking us how to hack away at the Qualcomm MSM in their device with QPST. It became confusing, daunting for the readers, especially those less technically inclined. At times, we all want to know how to get certain plan changes, what our options are with carriers, etc… but many topics are just too dense for that kind of a forum.

We’ve decided that to do this right, we really need two, completely separate forums.

The two forums we’ll be rolling out are the PhoneNews.com Forums, and a completely new site, with a great new name. We’ll be announcing the second site later this year. Our new forum on PhoneNews.com will be targeted towards general users, tackling the real problems both tinkerers and non-tinkerers have. Our second, new site will target enthusiasts and developers. Both will be accessible with a single user name.

Both sites, over the coming months, will continuously roll out with features like wireless viewing and posting, HTML5 services, and app access.

As economic conditions have continued to be, for lack of a better word, bad, we really have struggled to give PhoneNews.com the course and direction we envisioned around this time last year. Our goal has been throughout to develop the PhoneNews.com brand into a mainstream news organization, with superior interface, software, and tools to make it easy for you to get up-to-the-minute news, on all your devices.

We’re not there yet, but we are developing forums and a platform that will allow you to sign on once, and access it all easily.