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Feb 14, 2012 20 comments

Introducing the Money Mustache Forums!

Hey! What’s that new link on the menu above? FORUM??

YEAH! The Mr. Money Mustache blog now has its very own FORUM!!

Technical Wizard Mrs. Money Mustache has set it up, and I have pre-configured it with a variety of exciting topics that should spark discussion.

Check it out at https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/forum/

As with most online forums, read-only access is conveniently open to anyone. You only need to create a user account and sign in if you want to post messages.

For other webmasters considering a similar step, we used the “Simple Machines” forum, which was easy to install on the Bluehost hosting service.

Configuration takes a bit longer than the installation, but it mostly involves just clicking your way through a bunch of menus and making sure all the childish options are off (increasing privacy and permissions, turning off smiley face icons and censorship, etc).

Volunteer Moderators are welcomed. And helping out others is highly encouraged. From now on, I encourage readers to post their detailed personal finance questions in the “Ask a Mustachian” forum rather than sending them to me via the contact button. I’ll still see your request, but it will have a much higher chance of being answered since I don’t have time to respond to all of the longer emails anymore. And many of your fellow readers have already experienced, and solved, exactly the same problems you are now working on!

Enjoy!

 

Update: Holy Crap: just a few hours after its formation, this forum is taking off already! In yet another awesome demonstration  of the power of crowdsourcing, The Mustachians have started talking amongst themselves and answering each other’s questions. What fun!

 

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  • The Money Monk February 14, 2012, 6:08 am

    Sweet, I was hoping you would have a forum one day.

    Reply

  • Grant February 14, 2012, 6:14 am

    Thanks Mrs. MM!!

    Reply

  • Kelli February 14, 2012, 6:35 am

    SO EXCITED!!! However, I am bummed because I went over to check it out, and out of the first five threads, three are spam :( I spend a lot of time on the Simple Living Forums (hosted by The New Road Map Foundation) and this makes me wonder how many spammers really try to get on our boards and are dissuaded by whatever spam moats or whatever they have in place. I will be checking out the MMM forums but I just hope the spam doesn’t kill them before they can ever take hold!

    Reply

    • Jimbo February 14, 2012, 6:40 am

      Hold on now, I might be interested in a cheap Moncler jacket…

      No seriously, spam does suck. But Kudos on the forum, it’s a wickedly good idea.

      Reply

    • Mr. Money Mustache February 14, 2012, 7:19 am

      How strange that spammers are signing up! For now, I have deleted them and may set the approval to manual mode after the initial rush of sign-ups to the forum in the next few days.

      They were signing up even with the security image set to “high” to prevent scripts, verification of a real email address, and with a manual question I added that requires true/false knowledge of mustachian principles.

      So the spammers are actually a bizarre underclass of troll-humans that are manually navigating through the signup process just to post some advertising shit on a private blog forum. I learn something strange about our world every day!

      Reply

      • Heather February 14, 2012, 7:49 am

        I just registered, and wasn’t asked any true/false questions.

        With our skidogs forum, we ended up hacking in code for a question, in English. It was custom script so spam accounts were nonexistent for about a year. Then, it seems that real people spammers started trying, so I changed to manual verification. Still, there there aren’t many that bother reading and answering a real question.
        Your blog is probably 1000 times more referenced, though, so my experience might not be relevant or useful here.

        Reply

  • Joe O. February 14, 2012, 6:59 am

    Awesome. So excited!

    And yes, I’m sure MMM will deal with the spam problem, through moderators and filters. I wouldn’t worry too much about that.

    Reply

  • Teresa February 14, 2012, 7:09 am

    Thanks Mustache family – this is a delightful Valentine’s day surprise!

    Reply

    • Mr. Money Mustache February 14, 2012, 10:30 am

      Wow, is it Valentine’s day today? I’d better go out to the garage to carve a big wood heart or something for Mrs. MM :-)

      Reply

      • riley February 14, 2012, 5:38 pm

        I upcycled a Valentine’s card we received from the college we attended and met, celebrating our meeting there. Covered up the request for money with a post-it thanking my Mr. Money Mustache for teaching me his ways!

        Reply

        • riley February 14, 2012, 5:40 pm

          Just remembered….my husband’s first Valentines’ card to me in college was a heart carved out of wood! I kid you not!

          Reply

  • rjack February 14, 2012, 10:20 am

    Many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many thanks!

    Reply

  • Erik Y February 14, 2012, 10:59 am

    I’ve been reading your site for months and love it. I’m quite excited about the forum. I registered, but when I click through to validate my email it doesn’t seem to actually register. Any thoughts?

    Reply

    • Mr. Money Mustache February 15, 2012, 10:28 am

      I don’t have any thoughts, other than trying again later and/or with a different web browser. There are about 200 users signed up after the first day, so there is probably not too huge of a bug in the validation system.

      Reply

  • MIke February 14, 2012, 11:54 am

    Fantastic… Very happy you have these forums..,spam doesn’t bother me at all.
    I just tune it out.

    Reply

    • Mr. Money Mustache February 15, 2012, 10:26 am

      I think the spam is pretty much gone now – we’ve got the sign-up process nicely tuned, and no spam accounts have joined since then.

      I have also recruited an army of four moderators who now stroll casually through the conversations, armed with razor-sharp knives of User Account Deletion if they happen to notice a spam account trying to join or post.

      Reply

  • MacGyverIt February 14, 2012, 7:29 pm

    The Forum’s category names and descriptions alone fill me with Mustachian glee!!! I haven’t even begun reading, writing and sharing yet :-) Thank you Mrs (and Mr) MM!!!

    Reply

  • Hagbard Celine February 16, 2012, 12:15 pm

    I have a great dislike of sites which require registration. It is a thoroughly pointless waste of time having to type in an email address come up with a password, then login to my email to click an activation link. A simple captcha should suffice to prevent spambots.

    Reply

    • Mr. Money Mustache February 16, 2012, 2:27 pm

      Yeah, I don’t like having to register either. I also would have thought that the captcha would stop spam, but it doesn’t, and even the email verification doesn’t stop it (because there is an army of real spamming people trying to sign up as well) . Only once I added my highly advanced test question requiring knowledge of English, plus an entourage of four Moderators armed with Deletion power, did the spam registrations slow down, although it’s still an ongoing fight.

      By comparison, there is no registration required to write comments here on the main site, and I see there are.. let’s see… 857 spam comments in the auto-filtering bin, just in the week since I last emptied it. The volume is so great that I can’t even comb through to see if any real user responses were caught accidentally.

      On the positive side, once you register once, you can have your browser stay logged in (and save the password in case the cookie ever expires) forever. Also, requiring registration ensures that the forum participants are people who REALLY want to be there. Reduces the spread of complainypants disease.

      Speaking of staying on the positive side, you might want to work on the tone of your own comments ;-)

      Reply

  • Ashley Stallings March 21, 2018, 8:19 am

    Hi all,

    I’ve been searching, but can’t seem to figure out where you get the answers to the verification questions? Any help is appreciated.

    Reply

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