BiggerPockets Founder's Blog

We've made a minor improvement to the forums that we wanted to share with you:

See Who Voted on a Forum Post - Members can now see who voted on any given post by hovering their mouse over the vote button at the top right of any individual post.  A list of members will show up detailing those people who have voted. 

We're planning on making it easy to track the votes of any given member and should have that deployed in the next few days.

One of the places that our members like to spend their time is on our Off-Topic and Political Talk forums.  That said, these forums can often-times be a distraction and a time-killer. 

Recently, one of our members suggested that we remove these forums from the forum feed found in your dashboard.  We agreed that it would be a good idea to give our members the option to ignore these distractive, and sometimes controversial subject areas while navigating their dashboard.

Members Can Now Ignore Several Forum Areas from their Dashboard

We've made some changes in our dashboard which will allow members, by default, to ignore the Off-Topic, Political Talk, and all Marketplace forum topics.  You don't have to do ANYTHING if you want to continue to ignore these areas while looking at your dashboard forum feed.

If you want to see these areas once again, just go to your DASHBOARD and click on the Settings and Password link. Then, just click on the Dashboard tab (see above image) and you'll be able to choose which of these areas you once again want to see in your dashboard forum feed.

We appreciate all member suggestions for improving the site, and do everything in our power to make BiggerPockets a place where our members come first.

Thanks again, and don't forget to invite your friends, colleagues, and associates to join you here on BP!

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

INTRODUCING INFLUENCE & FORUM VOTING

We’ve established a point system for the forums (soon to expand to our entire site), which takes into account a member’s participation.  You can gain both positive and negative influence based upon what you do on the site.

The goal of this influence system is to reward those members who not only help their fellow users, but also those who help the forums to run smoothly.  As you can see from the chart below, those who participate by posting will gain influence points.  The real points come, however, when others deem your posts as helpful (by voting – see below), or when you help us to rid the site of junk/spam. 

On the other hand, as you can see, the impact of spamming the site, not following the rules (we need to edit your posts), or worse, is severe in terms of your influence points.

Voting

Influence Point System:

Action: Net Gain/Loss

Vote Post Up: 1
Each reply to your post gets you: 1
Post New Topic: 5
Reply to topic: 4
Have your Post voted up: 10
You mark a post as spam; no gain unless removed by admin or mod. If removed: 20, if edited: 10

Have your post deleted: -50
Have your post edited -10
Banned from individual forum -200
Banned from all forums -1000

We've made a few improvements to the site today.  Most of these are for administrative purposes, but the notable changes that you'll notice include:

•  Groups Home Page is Now Sortable -Our Groups page is currently sorted by the most recently updated group.  To help members better navigate the groups, we've added two new sorting options: Most Popular Groups and Alphabetical List of Groups.
• Forums Posts are now Searchable by Poster - Several members made suggestions to improve the forum search options on the site and we've obliged.  Now, in our Advanced Forum Search, members can search for forum posts by keyword and author.  The advanced search link can be found at the top left of all forum pages (next to the forum rules), and gives much more sophisticated search options than the basic forum search.