BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

There have been many important changes to BiggerPockets over the past week and we wanted to share these with you.

Forum Changes / Upgrades:

We just launched a drastic change to the look and feel of the BiggerPockets Forums. After years of having the same design, and a ton of feedback from our membership, we've reorganized how things are found on the forum.

Here's a list of the changes:

1 - We created new Sections called Categories that are color coded. Within each section are now sub-sections, and within those are individual forum categories.
2 - For each Section, we've added a navigation area on the left sidebar called Jump to Category, which will quickly take you to the section you seek.
3 - We've added a Popular Tags area in the left sidebar so members can quickly follow discussions under the tags they are interested in.
4 - We moved our Stats section to the left sidebar from the bottom of the page.
5 - We added a new search feature at the top of the forums.
6 - We added RSS buttons for the feeds of each forum category, so members can subscribe to those that interest them.
7 - On each individual forum category page, you can now see the description of that category so there is no confusion as to the purpose of that category.
8 - We moved the Related Topics to the bottom of the forum topics as requested by our members. 

We're working closely with the membership to make this change as easy to digest as possible, and are open to suggestions, as always.  Nothing is locked in stone, and we do have a few tweaks to make to the final layout of the new forum front page, but you have the general idea of where we're headed now.

New Forum Topics

In addition to all of the structural changes to the forums, we've actually removed some forum topics that weren't being utilized and have added some new ones.

The additions include:

- Political Talk - Found in the Off-Topic area, this forum was born out of a need to separate the heated political debate on the site from everything else.  Enter if you dare! 

- Buying Real Estate - Found in the new General Real Estate section of the forums, this forum was created so the non-investors could have a place to discuss any issues related to the purchase of a home.

- Selling Real Estate -  Also found in the new General Real Estate section of the forums, this forum was created so the non-investors could have a place to discuss any issues related to the selling of their homes.

We felt that BiggerPockets has become well known as the go to investing site, but that others might feel unwelcome.  We hope that the Buying & Selling forums, as well as our new real estate professionals area (for real estate agents, lenders, & contractors) might make those who may not have considered participating on BP, think twice.  I hope so!

Forum Awards

When we announced the new Awards system on the site, our awards page showed a tally of all who received any given award, but there was no way to tell who all the winners were.  We've since added a directory of all award winners for any given award.

Just go to the Awards page and click on any award, and you'll see everyone who won that award.  You can sort the list by date the award was granted OR alphabetically.

Influence Fully Implemented

When we first announced our Influence system, we had only deployed it to include activities on the forum.  We've since added to the system to include activities on the blogs, bulletins, profile, etc. Members can now gain influence from Referring New Members  by invite, referral link, or by importing their colleagues through other mail systems.

A subsequent post will include all possible scoring for you to see.

Additions to Our Stats Page

Our Site Stats page now shows those members with the highest influence score (a great way to see who has contributed the most to the community), and you can see those site members who are currently online.

PRO Account Upgrades

Thanks to a great suggestion from Nick J. (motiv8td), we've added the ability for our PRO members to see any external links that are sending people to their profile, blog, and property listings.  Once a visitor goes to any of those places through an external link, it will show up on your dashboard stats tab.

We know that our PRO members will find this addition to be incredibly useful!

Not Enough to Digest?  More to come!

As our long-time members already know, we're always working to improve the user experience on BiggerPockets! Be sure to let everyone know what we're up to, and that BiggerPockets is the place to be for real estate investors, professionals, and anyone else with an interest in the world of real estate.

 . . . doing so gets you some great influence points!

Thank you, 

Joshua Dorkin, Founder/CEO

BiggerPockets Blogs Improvements

We've made several new improvements to our blogging system this morning that I thought important to share:

1. Members can now post to their blogs using either our WYSIWYG (simple) formatting system, or select the ADVANCED tab and create their blog posts using HTML.  We added the ability to use HTML so our members can have more control over their design.
   

   
   
   

   
   

2. We upgraded our Blog Customizer color picker.  The old one was a bit disorganized and we figured we'd simplify the process.
   

   
   
   

   
   

Thanks to all of you who have started blogging.  There are some great new blogs on the site (a few that aren't so great, too) that are well worth checking out! 

Jump on our main blog page and check them out!

We've integrated trackbacks into our blogging system to help out members communicate with other bloggers -- on site and off.

According to Wikipedia:

A Trackback is one of three types of Linkbacks, methods for Web authors to request notification when somebody links to one of their documents. This enables authors to keep track of who is linking, and so referring, to their articles. Some weblog software programs, such as Wordpress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server, support automatic pingbacks where all the links in a published article can be pinged when the article is published. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback.

Our trackbacks should work with all of the major blogging systems.

How Trackbacks work on BiggerPockets Blogs

All you have to do is link to another blog post within your post.  You could link to a blog on BiggerPockets or any blog offsite, and the post that you link to will be notified that you're linking to them .

Linking to other blogs is a great way to gain publicity for your own articles, and to communicate with other bloggers.

Of course, you should not abuse these trackbacks, for the purpose of SPAM. 

Here's a few great points courtesy of RSSPieces:

• Each TrackBack allows you to have a conversation between blogs
• It is seen by the search engines as an emphasized link
• It is a courtesy for other bloggers to see where they are getting traffic from
• It will allow readers to follow an article between multiple blogs

Some Additional Resources on Trackbacks:

• What Are Trackbacks and How Do I Use Them?

• How a Trackback after a Comment Can Start a Relationship