“If you take a look at GFY, it’s got too many surfers, too much drama and not enough substance,” said Richard Fannin, aka Bama, who developed the new board in conjunction with fellow industry pioneer Persian Kitty. “I like to look at the ‘would you hit it’ threads as much as the next guy, but that’s not helping me get much business done.”
Bama told XBIZ that he saw an opportunity to provide webmasters with an environment more conducive to substantive business discussions — and to give webmasters more control over their board experience, as well.
On DramaMasters.com, users have greater control, including the ability to essentially serve as the moderator of their own threads. The site enables thread-starters to prevent members on their ‘ignore’ lists from participating in threads that they start, and the ability to delete posts in their own threads that are made by any user other than the site’s administrators.
“If someone bothers you, you can truly ignore them; you will never run into them again on the board,” Bama said. “If you have a ‘troll’ following you around and messing with your threads, you just set them to ‘ignore’ and that troll disappears for you.”
Another of the board’s features is the ability for users to set a custom banner that will appear in the banner rotation on the site. Upon registering for the board, users are granted one banner spot that is shared with the site on a 50/50 basis — meaning that in the top banner spot on threads created by a new user, the user’s custom banner is displayed half the time, while a banner of DramaMasters.com’s choice will be displayed the other half of the time.
As users acquire posts, the percentage split on the banner display shifts in their favor. After 1,000 posts, users get an additional banner spot that is shared on a 60/40 basis in favor of the user. After 2,500 posts, that split changes to 75/25, after 5,000 posts, the split becomes 90/10, and finally after 10,000 posts, the banner spot fully becomes the user’s, and the user’s banner will be displayed 100 percent of the time.
Another feature of the new board is the ability for users to create and manage their own blogs, hosted by DramaMasters.com.
The blog feature, banner sharing and moderating tools are all part of putting the webmasters in greater control of their board experience, Bama said — and sharing the benefit of the traffic that webmasters help to draw through their participation on the board.
“Webmasters make or break the board, so our feeling is that you should share the wealth with them,” Bama said. “There’s no other board out there doing that.”
