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Planned launch time is during April 2, 2023.
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No members will be able to post on the forum until launch time.
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He Wears Panties → Forum Discussion and Requests → First Posts While the Forum is being Built
 

Topic: First Posts While the Forum is being Built

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admin
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First Posts While the Forum is being Built
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The forum is currently under construction and will take just a bit more time to be built out. No one will be able to post until I have it mostly formatted and built out.

I believe an explanation is in order.

If you don't know what hewearspanties.com was, the landing page was a blog, but it also had a forum you could go to. They were both about men who wear panties. The forum was an anonymous place you could talk to like minded people about something that society sees as taboo. Hope Alexander use to run the blog and forum. She removed the blog after Amazon closed her affiliate account. Afterwards she just turned it into the forum. The forum broke after an upgrade and she was never able to fix it. It went down in May 2018.

Around February of 2022 I saw that the domain for hewearspanties.com went up for auction. I decided to bid on the domain. Being a previous member of the old HeWearsPanties forum I didn't want to loose it. The old forum let me figure out who I was and be comfortable with it. There ended up two other people bidding on the domain. I wasn't expecting to win. I probably paid too much for it, but here we are.

Having never done it before, I started to do research on how to host and moderate a forum. Being a software engineer I thought I would self host the site using open source software (phpBB, the same software hewearspanties.com was previously using). After seeing what that forum software could do I added some extensions to it and started coding some of my own. I had plans for some specific features.

Fast forward to a year later to February of 2023. I got an email notifying me of my domain renewal. I was a bit in shock that a year had gone by and I had very little to show for it. Project creep, money, time, anxiety and life all got in the way. I had to make the decision that I either let it expire or re-evaluate and make an MVP (Minimal Viable Product). I decided to go for it. I didn't want to throw the domain away like a pair of panties that I was ashamed to own. A lot of us go through a purge and binge cycles when we feel guilty. I knew if I let the domain go, I would never have the chance to get it back. I apologize it took me so long to get myself together and act on it.

Which now brings us to March 2023. I've decided on this forum for the software. Fairly low cost and I don't have to do the software maintenance. I regret and apologize not doing this sooner. I will try and communicate progress here in posts and be more transparent in the future.

TL;DR;

Old site went down. Domain went to auction and I won it. Took me a year to do something about it.



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Here are the plans and goals going forward.

March 2023

  • Get forum categories and topics setup. Will try to keep organization somewhat like the old forum. Probably will have more, but want to keep it simple.
  • Have forum rules setup. Will probably be slightly edited version of a generic forum rules. Want to keep the spirit of the old site though. Will be open to changes going forward.
  • Add an about page.
  • Create user titles
  • Work on SEO
  • Allow members to signup
  • Advertise in online spaces
  • Create some initial topics for people to talk about.

April 2023

  • Soft Launch Official Launch. Remove restricted access for members and allow people to signup and post.
  • Change the domain to be the actual forum instead of the current splash page. For the month of March the forum is under a free tier and I can't change the domain until it is actually under a paid subscription.

May 2023

  • Official Launch. Encourage people to advertise in their own online spaces that may be interested.

 

* Changed timelines and moved official launch to April. It was posted on reddit and is driving way more traffic to the site.



-- Edited by Kerry on Tuesday 7th of March 2023 01:55:22 PM

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Kerry
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Read this while you wait for the forum to be setup
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Got my personal site owner account setup seprate from the admin account.

Worked on setting up the different forums for topics.

I'm going to add an about page to the March timeline.


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Kerry
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First Posts While the Forum is being Built
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I've wrote outlines for rules. I'm still debating on a couple things. I've dredged through the way back machine so that it can help make decisions.

I've started to write the about page with a history of this forum.

I fixed some css issues of the site.

The forum has a limited number of bad icons that you can choose to add to user titles to. I ended up writing some javascript so I can fully customize icons to user titles. I've also come up with some preliminary titles based on the number of posts a member has done.

I've started to outline some advertising ideas to drive traffic to the site.

Some bad news though. The ability for custom domains has been disabled because they are working on SSL authentication. I'm going to have to call them to see when it will get done, because it actually costs more to have a custom domain rather then be on a subdomain of theirs. Not a show stopper. If it comes to it, I will forward the hewearspanties.com domain toward the activeboard subdomain until when it gets fixed.

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Kerry
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It is unknown when activeboard will fix custom domains. I was put on call waiting for a long time. So the domain will just be forwarded until it ever gets fixed. They are not going to charge me extra for the custom domain until then.

 

I added a countdown timer for launch. I hope it will get people excited.

 

I've decided on user titles and icons for number of posts. Can be changed in the future.

0 - New Member 

5 - Panty Apprentice  apprentice.png

25 - Panty Dame  dame.png

100 - Panty Duchess duchess.png

500 - Panty Princess princess.png

 

I've added google analytics to the forum to help me with SEO.



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Kerry
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The cat is now out of the bag. The launch was posted on Reddit and is driving traffic to the site. No problem though. Progress is going well so I'm moving the official launch to April.

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Kerry
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The about page is done! If you don't know the history of HeWearsPanties go read it on the about page.

Link to the about page.



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Kerry
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Privacy Policy page has been added.

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Kerry
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Rules are finished! Please read them. Member signup is going to be available shortly.

Please sign up while you wait for the launch date. You will be able to fill out your profile and create your avatar.

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Kerry
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Apparently I set some pages like privacy policy and rules to be member only. That has now been fixed and they are now public.

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Kerry
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After diving back into the old He Wears Panties forum, I've decided to have less categories to start out with. I did like the consolidation of the old forum, so I reduced it down. If going forward more categories would prove to be beneficial then I can create them and move any topics the would fit into it. The community will start out small so I believe this will be beneficial.

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Kerry
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Changed css link color to be more distinct while also still be congruent with the sites overall theme.

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Kerry
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Launch is in two weeks! Things are coming together and it looks like it will be ready by then. Please spread the word and invite others that would be interested.

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