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Another big board international community, LANeros.com is a featured as a great success for JulianD. Read on to learn about his community, its unique features and how he manages the administration.

FORUM BASICS:
What is the name of your website and a brief description of the theme/topic of the forums. What is the url?

My website is called LANeros.com (http://www.laneros.com). It's the word given to the people who assist to a LANParty . It begun as a hobby webpage for a bunch of friends. A place to post news and stuff. Then, the forums were added to the page. That was the most successful feature and allowed us to grow in traffic, users and posts.

Right now is a tech site with news, forums, galleries and other great features.

The most popular forums are the General forum, the Cell Phones forums, the Marketplace and the Windows forum. I think they're pretty self-explanatory each one.

Discussions boards were a big feature and something new to my country. I decided to open a discussion forum to allow people a more direct way of communication between them. According to vBulletin, launch date is April 2001.

Do you have any special forum features or activities?

The members use to create tournaments and special activities (like the best photograph of the month) between them. The last months have been pretty busy because we're sponsoring a major event on our country (Campus Party Colombia) and we gave away 40 passes to the event using different contest on the site.

SOFTWARE:

Which software do you use for your forums?

First we had Ultra Board (or something like that). Then, vBulletin. For add-ons we use vBulletin Blog, vBulletin Project, vbAdvanced, vB Gallery (not recommended), WiForums (not recommended)

HARDWARE:

What is your current server set-up? Do you have multiple servers for your big board forum? Who manages your servers?

I do all the managing. We have two dedicated and one vps. One dedicated is the front running lighttpd. THe other one for mysql. The VPS is for mailing and other scripts that I do not want to run on the main servers.

MEMBERS:

Membership stats? How many members?

We have 222,657 members right now.

What are the demographics of your site? (Percentage of men, women, age groups, locality related)

We don't have that information, yet. I think it's about 80/20 for men and woman. Age groups are 18-25, 49%; 26-30, 24%; 31-35, 10%; 14-17, 6%. Others percentages are minimum. The average age is 26. Most of our active members are from Colombia. But we have members from Argentina, Mexico, Chile, Venezuela and the US. We have a lot of visitors from spain too.

STAFF:

Tell us a about your staff including how many admins (and their functions), moderators, mentors, web-developers, etc. Explain how your staff is organized.

I'm the head admin, and I have one co-admin. The co-admin can take admin decitions within the site (new moderators, new forums) without my permission. It's like my right hand on the site. He helps other staff and things like that.

The other staff is simply three supermod and almost 30 moderators among all the forums.

REVENUE:

How do you generate revenue to cover your expenses? (Ecommerce, subscriptions, advertising, affiliate links, etc)

All income is from AdSense, but last week I got my invitation to Google Ad Manager and I'm configuring all the ad slots and placements to start selling ad space to local customers.

Do you offer upgraded members groups for a fee? What benefits do they get for subscribing/upgrading?

Yes we have, but it's a very minimal income and I'm looking forward to terminate the program. A few months back the subscription for $5.50 a year provided special functions within the site, including webmail. I had a hard time trying to handle the mail server and I decided to migrate to Google Apps Partner Edition (free). I can now create unlimited gmail accounts under my domain, each one with the >6GB storage. So I opened the creation of webmail accounts to anyone, that's why I think my paid subscription is now in its final days until I work out something better.

ADMIN:

What is your name? Please share a few things about yourself. (Bio, family, education, background, hobbies, your favorite pizza topping, your favorite vacation spot, your choice of transportation, etc)

Julian Muñoz

I'm from Medellin, Colombia, I'm 26yo, my hobbie is my 360, I play mostly FIFA08, GTA4, GRID (that one on my PC). I also play Wii with my wife (I'm married 7 months ago). Pizza topping, I think it's chicken, I love vacations on the beach. We have very great beaches on our country and countries close to ours. I have a Mazda 6 for transportation but I also love the Metro and walking.

How do you spend a typical day as admin on your site? What do you enjoy about your job as admin of your site/forums? Do you office in your home or in a separate office space away from your house?

I love waking up and see my site running. I usually check the posted news, check for errors and stuff. Then I check local news and tech news around the world to update my site according. After that, the community. PMs sent to me, mails sent to the support account... then it's time to serious work, I do some programming, upgrading software, ads optimization. That's my day. I usually spent time with my users and right now I'm in a FIFA08 tournament, we have very great times.

The most I enjoy about my work is the pleasure to see my users happy. That's why I work so hard on the site. I have a little office on my apartment and that's where I do all the work.

What has been the biggest obstacle you have faced in starting or running your forums? How did you/do you handle it?

I'm actually starting a new community right now. The hardest obstacle is to get your first active users. When you're starting a new site you need a lot of work on the community and promotion.

About running LANeros.com: the hardest thing is to keep up with the site as a whole. I'm the tech guy, the manager guy, the financial guy. So it's pretty busy work.

What 3 things have helped your forums to be a success?

1. Great active users
2. Google SEO
3. Hard daily work inside the community

Julian, congrats on the success of your big board forum, Laneros.com!