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Lets Make a new Adverts.ie

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  • 24-04-2014 12:21pm
    #1
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭


    I know some people here are extremely talented when it comes to web development so why not make a stand and build an actual community based site for selling unneeded items.
    Seeing as the majority of people on Adverts will be closing their accounts, they will need somewhere else to go !
    So who's up for it !?!?!?


«1345

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    #2
    Kenny Logins
    Registered Users Posts: 9,061 ✭✭✭Kenny Logins


    sw33t_r3v3ng3 wrote: »
    I know some people here are extremely talented when it comes to web development so why not make a stand and build an actual community based site for selling unneeded items.
    Seeing as the majority of people on Adverts will be closing their accounts, they will need somewhere else to go !
    So who's up for it !?!?!?

    Here go. Just follow this. :pac:

    http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=51


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    #3
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    Kenny Logins wrote: »
    Here go. Just follow this. :pac:

    http://thenewboston.org/list.php?cat=51

    Haha thanks, only problem is i cant do it all on my own :P


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    #4
    flutered
    Registered Users Posts: 6,668 ✭✭✭flutered


    i have not got a clue how to do it, quite a few offered their services on the present talk to adverts thread, a few pms and you should be ok.


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    #5
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    flutered wrote: »
    i have not got a clue how to do it, quite a few offered their services on the present talk to adverts thread, a few pms and you should be ok.

    Hopefully something can be made of this !


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    #6
    Creamy Goodness
    Registered Users Posts: 26,556 ✭✭✭✭Creamy Goodness


    No, just no.

    I'm pretty peeved about how they went about implementing (not thinking of all the possibilities) and informing people this 'success fee' and how they handled answering questions about it but you don't realise the sheer amount of time and materials (both people hours and infrastructure) that goes into a site like adverts.ie.


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    #7
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    Creamy Goodness wrote: »
    No, just no.

    I'm pretty peeved about how they went about implementing this 'success fee' but you don't realise the sheer amount of time and materials (both people hours and infrastructure) that goes into a site like adverts.ie.

    Believe me i know, i've worked on sites before. But wouldn't it be cool for a community to get together and work on something great ?


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    #8
    CrazyFish
    Registered Users Posts: 211 ✭✭CrazyFish


    I think you underestimate the amount of work it takes.


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    #9
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    CrazyFish wrote: »
    I think you underestimate the amount of work it takes.

    As you can see that doesnt go down too well ;)


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    #10
    Gordon
    Registered Users Posts: 35,523 ✭✭✭✭Gordon


    OSI wrote: »
    How do you plan to fund this site?

    You could charge people a small fee when they sell something?


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    #11
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    Im assuming people who wanted a good free community site wouldn't mind donating. That could possibly be looked into


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    #12
    Call Me Jimmy
    Registered Users Posts: 8,449 ✭✭✭Call Me Jimmy


    Not taking it too seriously but I feel adverts was an evolution am I right? Sure, technically it could be done, but I think the factors for its success were rooted in its association with the boards community. A lot less marketing needed to get it off the ground and wasn't it initially (possibly still is) basically a vbulletin forum?


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    #13
    CreepingDeath
    Closed Accounts Posts: 8,016 ✭✭✭CreepingDeath


    sw33t_r3v3ng3 wrote: »
    Im assuming people who wanted a good free community site wouldn't mind donating.

    Bit of a contradition!

    Boards & Adverts are just VBulletin sites as "Call Me Jimmy" said, probably tweaking the look and feel to set it apart from the stock vbulletin install and injecting adverts into it.

    Looks like VBulletin has a VBulletin Cloud hosting option.

    So for between $15 - $60 per month they would host/run the forum for you.
    You'd just need a few chumps to moderate it for free :p


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    #14
    Jonny Blaze
    Closed Accounts Posts: 753 ✭✭✭Jonny Blaze


    I already spoke with someone via pm to see if there is much interest in this.

    Could definitely help contribute.

    As you say creepingdeath, there are tools and frameworks out there that would take a large part of the sting out of developing something similar.

    It wouldn't even need to have all the features of adverts in fairness.

    Just a functional site which doesn't look like complete muck would do the job.

    And if we're only trying to recoup the actual run costs with no profit whatsoever we could possibly achieve it through ad rev alone.

    AWS and rackspace do a free years virtual cloud hosting which we could make use of and at least give us a year to get off the ground re: running costs / ad revenue.

    EDIT: Also, there have been several suggestions of alternative pricing strategies that have spun out from the adverts discussion that a lot of people seem like they would be much happier with so that could be worth a look.


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    #15
    livEwirE
    Registered Users Posts: 1,449 ✭✭✭livEwirE


    This is a brilliant idea guys. A free alternative to adverts with a pm system is badly needed!


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    #16
    Draco
    Subscribers Posts: 1,911 ✭✭✭Draco


    OSI wrote: »
    Boards and Adverts long outgrew vBulletin and have spent years seperating themselves from it. In fact Adverts is entirely new codebase built from scratch. Boards is almost entirely a new codebase itself and only relies on vBulletin for some legacy and low level stuff.
    It took a team of devs (that went from 3 to 6) 9 months to build the first incarnation of the the non-vBulletin version of Adverts. There was then a team of 4 that continued to main/update the site, occasionally supplemented by a couple of other devs to build the apps. I'm not sure exactly how many devs they have at the moment as I've not been talking to them in a while, but I'd say it's still 4 or 5.

    On top of that is a support team dealing with users and sales.

    It's a much, much larger project than people realise or give credit for.


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    #17
    mloc123
    Registered Users Posts: 9,454 ✭✭✭mloc123


    Jonny Blaze wrote: »
    AWS and rackspace do a free years virtual cloud hosting which we could make use of and at least give us a year to get off the ground re: running costs / ad revenue.

    AWS give you a single micro instance for free... have you used one?
    It is not powerful enough to handle a simple munin install with 2-3 people accessing it... let alone a site which you would expect to cater for thousands.

    What do you think the ball park annual costs for hosting a site the size of Adverts is? Ignoring the initial costs of buying hardware.


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    #18
    Jonny Blaze
    Closed Accounts Posts: 753 ✭✭✭Jonny Blaze


    Draco wrote: »
    It took a team of devs (that went from 3 to 6) 9 months to build the first incarnation of the the non-vBulletin version of Adverts. There was then a team of 4 that continued to main/update the site, occasionally supplemented by a couple of other devs to build the apps. I'm not sure exactly how many devs they have at the moment as I've not been talking to them in a while, but I'd say it's still 4 or 5.

    On top of that is a support team dealing with users and sales.

    It's a much, much larger project than people realise or give credit for.

    Of course it would be a huge effort but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

    Sure how many millions of man hours are pumped into open source projects?

    With experienced developers (who have less time and energy to devote) guiding younger more inexperienced developers and providing a road map from which to work, the main difficulty would be in sourcing people who have the will to make a sustained contribution.


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    #19
    Mullins07
    Registered Users Posts: 109 ✭✭Mullins07


    LOL.

    Let's write Adverts using vBulletin.

    Oh wait...

    https://web.archive.org/web/20060428050911/http://www.adverts.ie/

    So in 7 years we can expect your site to be as good as Adverts.ie is today?


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    #20
    Jonny Blaze
    Closed Accounts Posts: 753 ✭✭✭Jonny Blaze


    mloc123 wrote: »
    AWS give you a single micro instance for free... have you used one?
    It is not powerful enough to handle a simple munin install with 2-3 people accessing it... let alone a site which you would expect to cater for thousands.

    What do you think the ball park annual costs for hosting a site the size of Adverts is? Ignoring the initial costs of buying hardware.

    I know and yes I totally agree, they suck..

    But im thinking options here. Not to mention you would be lucky to get that kind of traffic early on anyway i would imagine.

    As I said earlier as well, there have been alternative pricing strategies proposed elsewhere that may or may not work.


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    #21
    snubbleste
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 31,117 ✭✭✭✭snubbleste


    Why not just start using craigslist? http://dublin.craigslist.org/
    It works very well. Basic and simple.


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    #22
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    CreepingDeath wrote: »
    Bit of a contradition!

    Boards & Adverts are just VBulletin sites as "Call Me Jimmy" said, probably tweaking the look and feel to set it apart from the stock vbulletin install and injecting adverts into it.

    Looks like VBulletin has a VBulletin Cloud hosting option.

    So for between $15 - $60 per month they would host/run the forum for you.
    You'd just need a few chumps to moderate it for free :p

    How do you propose getting the $15-60 for it ?


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    #23
    rovoagho
    Banned (with Prison Access) Posts: 1,151 ✭✭✭rovoagho


    I know the work that goes into a site like Adverts.ie, and to suggest it's insurmountable is simply nonsense. The work involved is minimal, you could start a site in 10 minutes flat using one of the hundreds of PHP scrpts (or Perl, or whatever takes your fancy) to get started, and build on that, just like Adverts.ie did with PhotoPost. And at least two people, including myself, offered free hosting for a year up to and including a physical server.

    The hard part in building a site like this, as anyone who actually knows knows, is in building a userbase. The technical hurdles are trivial at best. The userbase is already there, in the people that are disgusted with the way Adverts.ie has handled - and continues to handle - this car crash of a change.


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    #24
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    So who thinks they would be interested in contributing ??

    Here's what im thinking. Use a free web host (000webhost they do the job for a short period of time) for the first few months, until ad revenue were to get up to a point where it would cover costs. A domain name could be bought for no more than €10(would also be covered in ad revenue).

    The site could be built using PHP, MYSQLI, Javascript, possibly ajax.
    There would be a developers only part for the site. All ads would be listed free and any money we make, which would be through ads would be used to upgrade the site at a later time.

    Any other ideas ?


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    #25
    Kenny Logins
    Registered Users Posts: 9,061 ✭✭✭Kenny Logins


    sw33t_r3v3ng3 wrote: »
    So who thinks they would be interested in contributing ??

    Here's what im thinking. Use a free web host (000webhost they do the job for a short period of time) for the first few months, until ad revenue were to get up to a point where it would cover costs. A domain name could be bought for no more than €10(would also be covered in ad revenue).

    The site could be built using PHP, MYSQLI, Javascript, possibly ajax.
    There would be a developers only part for the site. All ads would be listed free and any money we make, which would be through ads would be used to upgrade the site at a later time.

    Any other ideas ?

    :pac:


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    #26
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    Kenny Logins wrote: »
    :pac:

    Great skills at making text bold ;)


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    #27
    goinginside
    Registered Users Posts: 25 ✭goinginside


    Hey guys,

    Im defo interested in contributing, I've got some spare hardware tucked away that I'm to give up for the cause. I think we could be really quick putting the site together with PostGres and a visual basic GUI.

    Count me in!


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    #28
    mloc123
    Registered Users Posts: 9,454 ✭✭✭mloc123


    goinginside wrote: »
    Hey guys,

    Im defo interested in contributing, I've got some spare hardware tucked away that I'm to give up for the cause. I think we could be really quick putting the site together with PostGres and a visual basic GUI.

    Count me in!

    What hardware have you? Have you access to hosting (power, rack space, aircon and bandwidth) also?


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    #29
    Kenny Logins
    Registered Users Posts: 9,061 ✭✭✭Kenny Logins


    sw33t_r3v3ng3 wrote: »
    Great skills at making text bold ;)

    I was going to swap the 'e's for '3's but thought it might make me look a little childish.


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    #30
    Draco
    Subscribers Posts: 1,911 ✭✭✭Draco


    Jonny Blaze wrote: »
    Of course it would be a huge effort but that doesn't mean it can't be done.

    Sure how many millions of man hours are pumped into open source projects?

    With experienced developers (who have less time and energy to devote) guiding younger more inexperienced developers and providing a road map from which to work, the main difficulty would be in sourcing people who have the will to make a sustained contribution.
    The point is not that it's impossible but that it is a large body of work that took a concerted effort to create and maintain. The idea that you could build and run a site like Adverts *as it is now* as a side project is ludicrous. Just dealing with user enquires would consume a massive amount of time (time that would have been otherwise spent of development).

    There are plenty of well maintained open source projects, just as there is an entire wasteland of abandoned , unfinished, unusable open source projects.

    Sure, you could set up something reasonably quickly with a vBulliten plugin or a one of the WordPress plugins ones and hope it works with no modifications. Would it work or look as well as the current adverts? Would it be customisable enough to handle all your requirements? One-size-fits-all plugins rarely do.

    Users don't just magically appear either - it's another thing that takes time, effort and money to attract. Sure there's a ground swell of users looking around right now but how many exactly? Once you've all of them, where you get more? What about buyers? Where are they coming from?

    AWS gets very expensive very quickly - it might be ease to use and setup but by god do they know how to charge.

    By all means, be annoyed with the new fees on Adverts.ie but don't think that a new site could pop up over night to replace it.


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    #31
    sw33t_r3v3ng3
    Registered Users Posts: 537 ✭✭✭sw33t_r3v3ng3


    goinginside wrote: »
    Hey guys,

    Im defo interested in contributing, I've got some spare hardware tucked away that I'm to give up for the cause. I think we could be really quick putting the site together with PostGres and a visual basic GUI.

    Count me in!

    If you look at both adverts and boards, they're both built from scratch. So why not just start from scratch ourselves ?? It would take more time but if its going to be done anyway why not just do it first thing ?


This discussion has been closed.
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