Religious Forums

History & Information

ReligiousForums.com is an online community with over 34,000 members. In 2014, I negotiated the purchase of Religious Forums from the current owner and for the company Group Net, LLC of which I was the Webmaster and Chief Operating Officer.

At the time of the purchase, Religious Forums was running on an outdated version of vBulletin . As our company used XenForo for our online communities, I immediately started the process of moving from vBulletin's forum software to the XenForo forum software. In just over a month from the purchase of Religious Forums, the community was migrated to the XenForo forum software and our best practices for our online communities were put into place.

• Converted over 24GB of MySQL data from the vBulletin platform to the XenForo platform while documenting and troubleshooting the migration locally before doing the final live migration.

• Worked with XenForo developers to migrate custom Invision plugin code to XenForo compatiable code.

• Worked with an XenForo designer to develop a custom theme that would bring a fresh and modern look to the website, while bringing a mobile first design to Religious Forums for the first time.

• Moved Religious Forums on to a dedicated web server powered by CentminMod. Optimized specifically for high PHP and MySQL throughput.

• Developed a monetization platform on Google Ad Manager using 3rd party ad networks. Eventually would move to AdThrive and see our revenue increase by nearly 100 percent.

Through our ownership of Religious Forums, I implemented SEO best practices, engadged with the community to solicit feedback for new features, implemented the features, created a social network presence and began marketing, and worked with the volunteer administrators and moderators to provide new tools to ensure that the community remained a safe and friendly place for members.

In 2018, I negotiated the sale of Religious Forums, along with BaptistBoard.com.