Do you have a website/discussion forum for your scanner feed?

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gcurtis79

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Hopefully I'm not out of line asking about this here, I'm not sure what category this best fits in.

I've been running a scanner feed for most of the last 11 years, and in the last couple years, we've developed quite a lot of community interaction. My wife set up and manages a face book group associated with my feed, and we have a decent amount of people that have joined.

We are looking to move away from face book, and I'm wondering if any other feed providers have set up websites or forums for their listeners to interact and discuss events related to their communities and scanner feeds. I've played with WordPress a little bit, but it's been way too many years since I've played with forums, and I'm curious if anyone else has developed a community following, and what they use to service them.
 

MtnBiker2005

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gcurtis79

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That nextdoor thing looks neat, but it looks like the 'neighborhoods' it places are too small to effectively cover the region my scanner covers.

I don't expect a full migration, but I want to be prepared for a decent amount of users that might shift over to whatever forum I do ultimately find. We've got over 6,000 local members of the group currently, 5,400 active in the last 7 days.

We have a lot of "neighborhood watch" style posting and information sharing. We even have a few local dispatchers that will sometimes source information from the group if it pertains to a particular call.
 

1808208

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Something like proboards might be to your liking , if it's a forum you want. Lots of features. And very easy to customize to your needs.
 

w2lie

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I'm currently using e107 for my scanner radio site. (Link in my signature). I'm using Wordpress for my Scanner Radio Podcast.
e107 has forums built in, but that software is a bit outdated. I tried running some community plugins on WP, but what I found wasn't all that useful.

WP is certainly the easiest to setup, install, and configure. You can start with BuddyPress and setup a community for free.


I"m currently in the process of moving my entire e107 site over to Joomla. There is a lot of development there and Joomla looks like a great fit. But after hosting with e107 since 2015 and having a large user base (10k registered members) and years of forums and downloads, converting isn't an easy task.

Of course, you can also run other forum software like phpBB or Simple Machines Forums. I've used both and both are very feature rich when it comes to forums.
 

thatoneiowan

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Before you make an actual move, I would also see what your audience thinks. People might not be willing to go elsewhere for info.

This is a good point...one of the easy things about Facebook is that it's easy to get to/access. I don't have to jump through hoops to get info. Being able to see scanner info while I'm scrolling thru is also nice.
 

PrivatelyJeff

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This is a good point...one of the easy things about Facebook is that it's easy to get to/access. I don't have to jump through hoops to get info. Being able to see scanner info while I'm scrolling thru is also nice.

there’s also the extra steps of setting up accounts and also remembering to go back. The one major upside is there’s no risk of some FB AI deciding to punish you and locking you out for obscure reasons.
 

Citywide173

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there’s also the extra steps of setting up accounts and also remembering to go back. The one major upside is there’s no risk of some FB AI deciding to punish you and locking you out for obscure reasons.
A lot of the board software out there now has a SSO plugin that will link it to your Social Media accounts, but yur point about remembering to go back is very valid.
 

w2lie

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You may be able to persuade your followers to join a Discord server. Many benefits on Discord that you can't grab on FB
(No Ads, no Zuckerberg tracking you).

You can segment the chats by specific areas on Discord, and even feed live audio. So imagine the possibility of hosting a scanner feed or two on there as well. Plus, you can setup a voice activated buff room all built in.

What I like about Discord is that the phone app will send status alerts to the mobile device, so a user doesn't need to remember to check the group like they would a website.
 
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