| 23 September 2009
Agora Media's Daniel Chapman's Ninjaforge is in the top 150,000 websites according to compete.com - with over 3 million visitors a year. It's so cool even allows for users who don't have the cash to join the ability to 'bug your way in' and earn a membership and upgrades all the way up to a life member without ever paying a cent simply by contributing to the community.
With thousands of members it's the largest community that is attached to the world's most popular CMS, Joomla.
Ninja Forge Joomla Community Mission and Values Statement
Our mission is to provide innovative, cutting edge extensions, tools, training and a community aimed at empowering developers, site owners and website designers no matter their current skill level. Our vision is of a community of confident, skilled developers, site owners and website designers maximising their abilites and perfecting their sites thanks to our tools, support and training.
Our values are:
* Social responsibility in all matters
* Unequivocal excellence in all aspects of our work
* Innovation and outside of the box thinking
* Honesty & integrity at all times
* To continually add value and benefits to our community
* To empower people to help themselves and gain independence
* Respond to community input and needs appropriately
* Constantly work toward improving our services, products and the value we provide
* Opens in all things between staff, and also with members
Ninja Forge Roadmap
This is the planned direction and goals of the Ninja Forge Extension Club over the coming year.
Ongoing Goals:
* Expand the current extensions offering by at least 2 per month (new extensions or signifcant upgrades of existing ones)
* Improve the current extensions
* Increase the written extension information and tutorials
* Increase video tutorial offerings
* Find and recruit a team of skilled developers and designers
For three years, starting in 2003, Expat Forums, founded by Richard Kastelein, was the largest online forum community for English speaking expatriates in Europe and it's tight strong community posted over 350,000 posts over the time.
Expatforums was an non-profit website developed through the hard work of
several individuals who, in true cooperation, came together to build a
genuine community online. Our intention was to create a place where
expats and expat wannabees could come together to share ideas and
information, help one another to succeed, and build friendships along
the way. Although we are focused on the expatriate community, we are
open to everyone. Anyone with an interest in living and working abroad,
or simply a lust for travel and new places, will find a home here. We
have a number of members who are currently living the dream, as well as
many who are not currently working abroad, but intend to someday. There
are also others who have since returned home, as well as travellers who
are on the road and find this site useful for information on places to
visit. Many of us travelled for a while before settling down as
expatriates, and some still travel for business. Travel is a recurrent
theme around here.
Where We've Been - A Little History
We
started off as a group of bulletin board refugees who walked away from
a commercial site that clearly did not care about its customers. We
endured years of technical problems, annoying popups and animated ads,
and poor customer support, and the final straw was an unannounced
software "upgrade" which removed many popular features, as well as
deleting over 200,000 posts. We decided to take matters into our own
hands. A small group of us built this site as a form of protest, in
order to lobby to get our old board back, or at least a more functional
version of the new board. Although we were unsuccessful in swaying the
marketing behemoth, we soon realized that we had built something
entirely better. We polled our users for a new name, and one was chosen
from among 15 nominations. ExpatForums.org was born! Our community
still makes many key decisions via polling and user suggestions,
allowing membership input into the growth and direction of the website.
Come Right In, Make Yourself at Home
So
if you are lurking in the background, please sign up and come on in.
You will need to register with a valid email address, because you will
receive a confirmation link for validation. Your information will
always remain private, unless you choose to disclose it. If you are new
around here, head for the introduction thread and tell us who you are.
Thanks to all those that helped make this site the place it is
including dreamportal, gadreel, muppetmaster, bobgiblet, and rorschach
in particular. And thanks to the many who continue to donate to help
keep the site running.
Cheers and welcome
