Lefora News

Lefora has passed a few milestones in 2010, including passing 100,000 hosted forums. Since our launch in 2008, we’ve been working hard to scale the Lefora platform to ensure that your forums and topics load quickly no matter how active they become.

As part of our strategy to continue growing the Lefora network, on Friday, July 23rd, we entered an agreement with CrowdGather, Inc. to acquire the Lefora platform and properties. There will be absolutely no changes to the Lefora platform nor it’s feature set. The transition has been seamless and we’ve put a lot of time & effort to make sure that no forums experienced any downtime.

To be clear, our pricing plans and our free service will stay the same. There are no plans to make any changes, Lefora is a great service and CrowdGather shares our vision in keeping it that way. The advantage is now Lefora joins an even larger network of thriving communities as we continue to grow. By combining forces, we ensure that we can offer the same level of value without increasing our costs.

You will continue to get the same level of service and support from CrowdGather and the existing Lefora team will be here to help continue carrying our mission forward – “to make forums easy”.

The entire Lefora team is excited about our future. We’ve been in close communication with the CrowdGather team since our launch in 2008 and we have an incredibly positive outlook for what the future holds.

Read more about our news on MarketWatch.

Reflecting on our Public Launch

Last week we went live with a ‘public launch’. As many forum admins may be aware, we had a private period before this where we were keeping quiet to the ‘silicon valley’ circle what we were building out. Our private period drew potential forum admins to our service via google ads. This plan worked very well for us, because it allowed us to closely work with an active and engaged community before publicly launching. Their feedback directly contributed to the product you see today, and the feedback we’re receiving today is contributing to the product you’ll see tomorrow.

Our official public launch on Wednesday, April 9th, 2008 drew a lot of attention from blogs and a few news outlets, such as the San Francisco Chronicle. Some of the larger blogs included TechCrunch and c|net’s Webware.

We had 500 forums created within just the first 24 hours of our launch. TechCrunch was a large slice of the pie driving traffic to our site, with almost 24% of referrals coming from TechCrunch. Another, slightly smaller, slice of that pie came from various RSS readers (17% Google Reader, 3% netvibes, and 2% Bloglines – pretty easy to see who’s dominating the online feedreader market.)

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Celebrations?

As with any good news, we take that as a time to celebrate and enjoy life. By Wednesday night, we were all starving, so only one cuisine could feed 7 hungry men, Churrascaria (aka Brazilian Barbecue).

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Earlier this week, we spent time reviewing our past progress and how we want to keep moving forums forward. We figured the best place to get our product ideas flowing, would be where one of San Francisco’s best beers gets their product flowing – The Anchor Steam Brewery.

For more photos, check out some of these linked below:

• Team photo one & two.
• Moustaches for all.
• Anchor Steam closeup.

Hello World!

We believe that forums are essential to online communities. lefora was started to bring forums up to speed with the latest ‘social’ and ‘technological’ trends seen across many of the ‘web2.0’ sites that have popped up over the past few years (has it really been that long?)

The existing forum market is huge, however the options that exists for everyday people are pretty slim. You pretty much have phpBB and derivatives, vBulletin, InvisionPowerBoards, or something tacked onto a larger service (like facebook’s groups). We want to change all that with an offering that is simple to use, fun to use, and makes life easy for admins and moderators. And that’s why we created lefora forums.

This blog will try to focus on a few things:

• Where are forums headed?
• What makes for a successful forum?
• How do forums enable “community”?

We’ll talk about our own vision, but we’ll also bring in forum admins from across the web to get their take as well.

Remember, forums pre-date the web, but they don’t have to feel that way.