As I no longer have the time I think this site deserves, I have decided to sell communiteer.com, the blog, and associated domain names (communiteer.com, communiteer.net, thecommuniteer.com, and communiteering.com).  If you are interested in purchasing the package, please contact me with your offer at jason[at]communiteer.com.  I prefer to sell to someone who plans to carry forward the concept of teaching people how to build successful online communities. 

I’ve completed upgrading Communiteer.com to WordPress 2.5 and I think I have everything working correctly again.  I also took the opportunity to clean up a few template  issues when the site is viewed under FireFox.  There’s still plenty of work to do on the overall template, but at least the clipped text is gone now.

If you have a WordPress-based blog, you should definitely check out the new version.  One-click plugin updates alone make the upgrade worthwhile!

One of the reasons I haven’t been updating this site much lately is the incredible volume of comment spam we get. I’ve finally installed a CAPTCHA control on the comments form to help. I know this is a little more inconvenient for legitimate readers posting comments, but I think the net effect will be a more lively and useful website for everyone. We’ll find out soon!

The Communiteer forms are now officially offline. We were getting way too much nasty spam for them to be useful. When I can find a reliable (and free) anti spam tool for the forums, I’ll look into bringing them back.

You might have noticed the amazing amounts of spam on our forums lately. Since I don’t have the necessary time to police them, I’ll be taking them offline for the time being. When I can find the right solution to keeping them spam free and productive, I’ll bring them back.

It occurred to me that I’m not necessarily practicing what I preach here at Communiteer.com.  You won’t find (yet) incredibly active forums, lots of comments per post, or a thriving base of user-generated content.  If you’re reading this blog and wondering how you can trust my advice if I don’t have a thriving community myself, read on.

First off, I run a couple of other fairly successful online communities.  I don’t feel the need to share exactly what they are for a few reasons because what’s really important is the set of best practices I’ve learned through experience. 

My primary mission here at Communiteer.com is to share these best practices with you so you can see what works best for your own site.  The ideas you read here may or may not work for your specific situation, but hopefully they’ll give you some new options to investigate.

If, along the way, we end up engaged in creative conversations, trying various modifications to the community-building tactics I blog about, and learning from each other, well - that’s icing on the cake.

Shortly after completing our upgrade to Wordpress 2.0.6, version 2.0.7 has been released!  We completed our upgrade to this new version tonight and have restored the original site theme.  So as far as we know, we’re back in business!  Thanks for your patience through the technical turmoil.

If you’re running a Wordpress blog and haven’t upgraded to v2.0.7 yet, better get on it.  In addition to some bug fixes, it includes important security updates as well.  You can read more details at the Wordpress blog. 

We upgraded to the latest version of WordPress last week but had some glitches in retaining the previous site template & customizations.  Rest assured, we’ll have this fixed as soon as possible.  Thanks for your patience!

I installed Mike Smullin’s AJAX Comments 2.0 plugin for WordPress tonight.  It integrates AJAX technology into the comments form, posting them in realtime without reloading the page.  Give it a try by adding a comment to this post below.

Ok, I borrowed a tagline from Zune, but you have to admit it’s kinda catchy.

Alex King released version 1.3 of his Share This plugin for WordPress today and I’ve added it to our site.  This plugin adds a simple text link to each blog entry that lets readers quickly post the article to any one of several social bookmarking services.

New features in version 1.3 include a configurable icon with every link and better support for mobile users and users with JavaScript disabled.

If you haven’t tried social bookmarking yet, it’s a great way to get some additional traffic for your blog and to find new and interesting topics relevant to your online community.  To get started, check out del.icio.us and digg.com.