r2i forum

Tail wagging the dog

http://www.r2iclubforums.com/forums/entry.php/278-Tail-wagging-the-dog

Introducing a New Website.

INDIAN REAL ESTATE BOARD.COM

- Exclusively meant for real estate discussion.

Why are we doing this ?

Our system got crashed last week and it made me sleepless for a day. Unfortunately my ever reliable best friend Desi was out of station. It was a really painful to see the site not available for the whole day. One of our backup was corrupt too and we have to roll back to one more day, in that process few lost about 20-30 posts. In a day we average about 700-1200 posts. Since the system was not stable on that particular day, luckily, there were no too many posts.

We had some warning signs and we were preparing for this kind of situation. Recently there were several complaints about accessibility of our r2iclubforums.com and the performance of server was severely affected. Like me all of you might have experienced Server busy messages.

Our membership has grown up very fast and we are closing on Mile stone of 35,000 memberships. We were continuously upgrading our server but still that was not enough.

Today we are number one in Indian real estate related discussions. For any major project announced in India, if we google, we are in the first two pages of the search results. And ours is not a real estate forum, our forum is meant to discuss NRI issues, Returning to India, R2I related finances etc.,

Members may recall my apprehension about changing face of this forum over the time. We are moving from predominantly NRI forum to predominantly Resident Indian forum. While I was becoming more and more Indian, the forum was becoming one too. It is purely coincidental and nothing planned.

We have lot of members who login read the real estate forums and logout. They spend their entire time in browsing the RE discussions. Majority of these members are Indian-Indian and have no interest in R2I discussions. This group is growing in numbers and we must accept their needs and give them enough space that is rightfully needed for them.

At the same time, R2I Club members who were with us from sify days, MSN time and moved to vbulletin space with us feel bit alienated with ever increasing number of threads and forums of Real Estate subjects.

It was bit like Tamil - Srilankan situation or Israel / Palestine situation. By splitting the forum, I sincerely believe we will keep the identity of these two groups and keep both of them happy.

(1) Each group will feel good about having their own majority needs taken care.

(2) Server hardware will be happy to share the load and we should see better response. ( It will take some time to reap those benefits)

(3) If the server goes down, the admin team will still be able to communicate with members the situation. Members will not feel like left in lurch.

We will have cross links to help seamless movement between the two forums. We will try to minimize the duplicates as much as possible. I am bit concerned that Community Lounge may get duplicated in the new site. Indian-Indians who like to talk about local movies need not join an NRI forum to do that. :wink

I am all ears. Like to listen to what you all got to say. You all have been great guiding force behind the success of this community. :thup:

You still could have those forums/sub-forums here with just one thread within pointing to the other site. You could lock down the forum/sub-forums from creating new threads. This is for the transition period.

BTW, how are you planning on handling these type of real-estate related threads?

http://www.r2iclubforums.com/forums/showthread.php/21814-Buy-to-let-hotel (in Classified->Group Deals)

Awesome! Maybe that is what "(server)failure is the stepping stone to success" means. Best Wishes for continued success!!! :)

Deleted...

At the risk of annoying a lot of people, I must say that real estate discussions were far too much for me. But I certainly understand the interest others may have in real estate forum. So I am happy that they are being separated. Thanks.

RRK,
Wish you all the success in the new initiative. We would need Raj Kachori treat to celebrate along with Ratna Cafe coffee :)

I have one suggestion. Web hosting of this site is currently done from US and based on webhosting server's settings pattern done in most hosting companies, it sets the max.usage parameters for local time usage. Most of the server issues crop up when Resident Indians login (in the Indian day time) or early morning east coast time. If RE discussions are driving the 50% traffic along with resident indian participation, may be the new site should be by Indian based web hosting service. If not at least ask the US web hosting company to tweak the parameters per geographic usage.

Do you want to know where the current visitors are coming from ?

Which country and which city residents are accessing r2iclubforums.com ?

Go to Forum home page >> On the sidebar on Right side, look for a small button called GeoVisitors. Click that, you will get the world map with pins showing the locations of our visitors..

This whole spy thingy is as good as a RSS feed. Its only a spy if it can get some hidden information. All this spy does, is stream all newly posted messages instead of the user clicking the "New Posts" link. The word spy isn't right, IMO.