Feross.org

Hey everyone. I’m working on a couple of cool new projects that I want to let you know about!

AP Study Notes

I’m planning to completely rehaul my AP notes site, APstudynotes.org, and rebuild it from the ground up. Right now, it has a bunch of awesome notes for 3 popular AP classes (US history, US government, and English Language/Literature), but it’s still lacking in quite a few areas. The site is still in development, and I’ve got a lot of work to do on it, but it’s already been extraordinarily popular. Right now, it’s getting 1,200,000 page views and 520,000 unique visitors annually! I haven’t advertised it at all, but the feedback has been overwhelming. I get emails every week from thankful students, and even some from eager students asking why the notes for a particular AP class aren’t posted yet!

Continue Reading »

575 Inactive Forum Users on StudyNotes.org

When I launched the the StudyNotes.org family of websites in mid-2008, I created a discussion forum so that members could interact with each other. The sites got off to a great start — the AP section alone received 150,000 page views and 55,000 unique visitors from its launch in mid-2008 until the end of the year. Pretty impressive for an incomplete site that I did not promote at all.

The discussion forum, however, was a different story. The forum didn’t see much activity at all, with less than 70 posts at the end of the year. Unfortunately, part of the reason for the forum inactivity was due to an error on my part.

The Damage

Users were registering for the forum, but not receiving activation emails. Thanks to one user who emailed me, I was prompted to investigate. That’s when I discovered the problem: misconfigured SMTP (email) settings in phpBB (the forum software that runs the StudyNotes.org forum).

So, when I checked out the “Inactive Users” section of the Admin Control Panel, I was amazed to see 25 pages of inactive users!

That’s 575 Inactive Users!

Some users have been waiting for activation emails since August — that’s over 6 months. No doubt, they’ve been constantly refreshing their inboxes for 6 months straight, waiting for that email.

It’s pretty obvious that having 575 additional users on the forum would have been a boon to forum activity over the last 6 months.

So, what caused the problem?

The problem was incorrect SMTP email settings in phpBB. Obviously, I initially entered the correct information. A typo wasn’t the problem. The problem arose when I decided to switch to Google Apps for my website email. The switch to Google Mail required me to change all my domain’s MX records to point to Google, which, of course, made the old phpBB SMTP settings invalid. Bad, bad, bad…

Lessons learned?

Don’t epically fail in the future.