We’ve been debating for the last few months about the best way to get a forum on our site. We came to the conclusion that a forum should definitely be available to a music ranking site such as ours, as forums are the backbone of so many other music sites.  If our goal is to have people express their opinion on music, an open place to discuss such topics should be readily available.  Will people yell and scream and call each other bad names? Probably. Will they come back to our site and increase our page views and user base to check up on the status of their latest thread titled (e.g) “Why DMB = DUMB”? We hope so.

So we want a forum.  Great, let’s download phpBB and have it up in a few minutes.  Oh that’s right, we have an RoR site…okay, so let’s find the Rails equivalent.

Sadly, nothing easily integrated with our authentication system, and nothing screamed so loudly “I’ve got to have this! Look at all these amazing features!” that made us want to mod it to integrate well.  So I took the opportunity to create a custom forum from the ground up, and the starting block was this article riddled with errors from Nettuts (Nevertheless, many thanks to the author Alex Coomans and Nettuts).

After correcting all the article’s naming errors that came from copy and pasting code many times over, I had a nice starting point with associations and all that fun stuff set up.  Don’t get me wrong, I am a big fan of any tutorial like this, errors or not – it’s an invaluable resource for us web folk.  By not relying on a pre-built forum, it was painless to integrate our users and authentication system, along with our database of artists and user-contributed rankings.

Check out the semi-finished product here.

What’s next in the feature list?

• Email notifications if you get a reply to your topic or post.
• Tie into rankings and artists with a Twitter-like @user system, or #artist.  It would be cool to post a reply in the “Why DMB = DUMB” thread: “Hey all you haters, check out my @DaveMatthewsBand rankings, they will change your view on DMB”, and then have the text after @ link directly to your ranking.
• A challenge system: “I am calling out User X on Rankings Y.  Please explain in detail why this is your opinion, and do it now!”
• Some kind of rewards system.

Let us know what you think!

The follow-up question is pretty simple: Who are we trying to please? As a bootstrapped team and without an outside investor telling us what to do, I see two segments: our internal team (the Athens team) and our external team (the community).

We’re running at our own pace, and we’re having a great time with the journey. Our current profits are chump change in the big scheme of things, but it’s comforting to know that our community gets stronger and dataset becomes more valuable by the day with each successive ranking that comes through.

I can’t emphasize enough how so many other sites have popped up since I began work on Rank ‘em, but as they become heavily reliant on an active community, is that the most sustainable model? Just look what happened to MySpace. They were on top of the world after Robert Murdoch acquired them, and now they’ve completely fallen off. That’s the life of a social network for you. (As a sidenote, I’m not convinced Facebook will be able to maintain their presence in the long haul, but they’re in a different stratosphere and good for them for making the social web reliant on their existence.)

In general, there’s only so many eyeballs to go around. I’ll take building a resource over creating a social network any day. Wikipedia has set the sustainable model, and it’s part of our overall mission to create the Wikipedia for Music Discovery.

The website is only as valuable as the rankings that have been shared by our community of passionate and opinionated music fans.

When we initially brainstormed the idea for our homepage, I specifically emphasized one thing: simplicity. Considering we were running a search engine, who better to emulate than Google? When we first released our private alpha in February 2009, the homepage was pretty darn simple. It included two things:

1. Logo
2. Search bar

Over time, we realized that initial members would come to the site and freeze up a la the fainting goats (must watch on YouTube for those who haven’t seen it). Essentially, when you’re presented with too many options, you can’t make a decision.

We figured that we needed to add some prompts so our users could have a little more guidance. At the end of 2009, we released a new layout that accounted for this consideration, but compromised the focus of the page.

Through our association with MusicBrainz, who I affectionately call the “Wikipedia for Music,” we’ve indexed 400,000 (and counting) different artist pages. We lost sight of the importance of our search engine, and the user flow of our homepage brought visitor attention to the bottom of the page.

Now, we’re excited to release our latest revision of the homepage that showcases our search bar. We’ve also tried to do a more succinct job of conveying our mission. Lastly, if you still need prompts, we are cycling a number of artists from different genres that epitomize what we’re all about.

We still have a couple minor (but meaningful) additions that should be rolled out over the course of the next couple weeks. Thanks for reading, and we’re glad to have you along for the ride!