It is said "A rising tide raises all ships". This applies here as well in judging this month's current crop of member's sites. More than 20 sites were submitted in our second monthly member's spotlight , and the overall level of excellence and volume of applicants all rose quite measurably.

An unusual circumstance happened on the way to the judging, one member had two sites submitted and they both received enough votes to tie for first place among the entrants this month. No mean task considering the talent and hard work on display among the >20 entrants... Especially as good as the rest of the field of entrants were.

Neal "Thradar" Ulen , webmaster of this month's member spotlight sites MovieFanOnline and GamerForums sat down with us this week to fill us in on a few little secrets of the trade. Read on and catch a glimpse on what it takes to build a world-class online community. Congrats Neal, on your first place win.

Our second place winner, SpeedCorp - overseen by uber-webmaster John was the favorite of several of the members of our judging panel as well, garnering several first place votes in the process. A wealth of information can be found at his site regarding high speed computing and broadband access. The interview for his excellent site will appear in 2 weeks.

Congratulations to both of our winners.

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Allen

- http://www.stand318.com

Exelent choise!
Congratulations guys.

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I got also UBB hacks database

???

There is almost no work in that UBB,
unlike oneminuteleft.com and Speedcorp.com?

Just my opinion...
but I gave this site the least chance of winning.

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"I hear no sound, I inhale myself, I inhale the urge to kill, I feel pain, but it ain't there"

Congratulations Thrader!! Your hard work, design and integration passed the test and gained high marks for both sites. You're doing wonderful work and I wish you continued success now and into the future.

Congrats to Speedcorp as well as all of the other entries that participated this month. It was very difficult to judge given the high level of outstanding boards that were entered. Keep up the wonderful work everyone... you're all doing a marvelous job... and it's a pleasure visiting all of your boards.

Cheers!

Thanks everyone!

- From speedcorp and all our members

Well, i must just be watesing my god damn time, If you ask me, my FREEWARE board has a lot more time put into it, and alot more hacks, but i guess having a freeware board looking better the a full version hacked board doesn't count for anything, doesn't matter, once zanardi is finished im gone.

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My Freeware Board

I had a question also- shouldn't the awards also be based upon the actual community you have? How popular your board is?

no, they should not, this is an award for thoose people with good hacked ubbs, not how many members they have or what they talk about.

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My Freeware Board

So you don't think the community along with a ubb matters? Isn't that what a ubb is for?

I'm not about to get involved in this debate. Just wanted to stop in a say thanks to everyone and congrats to John and SpeedCorp as well! I will probably have another UBB in development shortly.

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Neal 'Thradar' Ulen
Webmaster www.gamerforums.net
www.moviefanonline.com

Come on guys, accept it.
Next time work harder to get next month's member spotlight...

There is nothing to argue about this, it was not one person who choose those sites but whole team, and you cant expect to choose all sites from them.

Those are my 2 well earned cents...

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I got also UBB hacks database

okay...do you NOT know the point of this site is? this is not a make your ubb communety better site. This is a make your UBB better site.

Your pretty much saying that if someone has a non hacked board, but has 15,000 members, who are all nice, and talk alot to someone who has 10 members but has a outstanding ubb, the guy with the 15,000 members should win?

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My Freeware Board

Any way you can post all the vote totals for the boards that didn't win? I'd like to see what position I ended up in.

And congratulations to the winners!

Adam
topmudsites.com

yea me too...i wanna see the votes......

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...................
I don mean dis in a disrespectful way//
But colombine happens in the ghetto happens every day//
Uncle L

I really have nothing to be ashamed about my board not being picked (http://dbz.star64.com/cgi-bin/Ultimate.cgi). I was just shocked that it was one of the many that was in the contest. Being recognized as one of the many contestants is good enough for me. I installed the UBB in August 2000 and already accumulated over 700 members for such a small personal site. I'm very proud of my UBB and so should everyone else. Happy Hacking!

We expected a few sour grapes from some people... Work to make your site better if you want to place better. You would do well to read the interviews from our first three honorees to see what it takes to build excellence into your site. It's not just installing every "hack" in the database... For some guidelines to see what your site is judged on, check out this thread: https://www.ubbdev.com/ubb/Forum1/HTML/000003.html

There were about 25 entrants, and the team only handed in their top 3 choices, so we can't give a break down of everyone's placing... it just doesn't exist.

You see now what it takes to win... we will be here for some time to come, those who didn't win, please continue to work on your site and submit when you feel it is ready.

CE, you do have a nice site, but please watch your language if you plan to continue to be a part of this one.

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Allen

- http://www.stand318.com

It was a pleasure to be mentioned as an entrant ... i guess it's too hard for a german site to be on the topList *G*;
chris http://technoforum.de

Haha, I didn't think I will see so many sour-grapers in this contest, but I did. Thanks for the laughs.

Anyway, congrats to Thradar and John. Now that you two are out of the running, maybe the rest of us will stand a better chance

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Open Tech Support
http://www.opentechsupport.net

I think some people are missing the point here. The point of this contest is NOT to see who can hack the most, but who has the most innovative and creative use of a UBB whatever that is.

People, this contest is not about awarding "perl gods" but rather awarding members who have taken the time to offer their members something unique.

As for the number of members, all I can say is that a site doesn't have 15k members for nothing.

Great job guys!! Congrats and keep up the good work!!

- DB

Congratulations you guys!

My hats off to ya!



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Visit Alien Soup Forums
http://www.aliensoup.com/cgi-bin/forums/Ultimate.cgi

Nice boards, all of them.

To the people complaining, I think you should bear in mind that good design and style is as much about the blank spaces as the picture itself.. Simplicity is almost always good design. I've seen UBB's that are modified through the roof, but look terrible, because they have too much going on, and the little details haven't been taken care of. Personally, I see this contest as being about style and design, more than about programming.. Those sites were all easy on the eyes, and had a few different features that I liked, one I'm even thinking of using on my own boards..

-Just my 2 penneth-

-hey, I'm English, we have pennies not cents-

Lucia -

Haven't seen you around in awhile! Sort of missed you here ...

- DB

Yeah, I've been busy.. Too much stuff to do, and so little time..

I'm really impressed: so many very nice UBBs out there; the main thing i recognized is that some guys are trying to install every hack: maybe there are so many pretty useful things our there but most of the boards became horrible to use: too many features, too many grafix and things which might confuse the users... wenn starting the technoforum.de i wanted my users to have a quick overview whats going on with the electronic music: that's why we don't have moderators, that's why i deleted the 'icon'-gfx in the mainView and that's why we don't have any sub-categories: they may confuse our users and so there might be the question, where to post something... yes. i did install a few mods/hacks so make the site more user-friendly; but the main thing for me is to think about missing hacks/mods out there which may be VERY useful for my site. that's why i did 'develop' the ICUmessenger, the BookmarkHack and the working version of the 'new private message'PopUp (which is going to be modified soon); right now a friend of mine is coding a javascript-based Messenger which parses the onlineUsers from dave's "who is online"mod via SSI: i'd like my users to stay on my site and to force the communication between our users without just posting some sort of crappy 'smalltalk'... I did include a flashChat into my Ultimate.cgi and my users love it so far: without any JavaApplets or complicated PlugIns they talk about topics they read in the Ubb - so i avoid unnecessary smalltalk ...

well, 8 months ago i nearly was unable to spell 'perl' but now I'm a littlebit into it and I'd like to develop more usefull mods/hacks: it seems that a lot of users have a look at the source of UBB and then try to find anything they might change. I do the other way: I'm thinking about what's REALLY usefull and then I'm going to try to code it...

Again: respect to the winners out there..!

chris