The hassle-free, fully-managed, multiple-domain hosted forums solution that won't steal your family dog and shoot out the tires in your trans-am.
We're not talking about hosting the same content on different domains, no. When we say multiple domains, we mean that you can host as many separate forums as your plan allows, all on domains you own, and manage them all from a single interface.
Ape Estate was built by forums power users, for power users. The user experience is designed to tighten the feedback loops that make for great discussions and vibrant communities.
We take speed seriously, so you don't have to. Ape Estate is relentlessly optimized in the name of speed. Everything that can be cached, is cached. Every backend bottleneck has been profiled and eliminated. Diminishing returns? What's that? We can make it faster.
Promote users to moderators, set users to read-only, or ban users via our one-page user management interface. And better - do it all without ever seeing a checkbox or a confirmation prompt. We keep you on the same page the entire time, so you never lose your place.
Rearranging your forums shouldn't require a spreadsheet. Click and drag to set forum positioning, nest forums as subforums, and delete unused forums.
Create an unlimited number of forums and subforums for your community. Nest as many forums as you want, or organize forums into logical groups. Got a lot of forums? No problem. Put them into collapsible groups and your users can
Pin and rename topics, close topics, and even move topics to other forums without ever leaving the page. Your changes will be reflected instantly, and you'll never have to suffer through redirects and landing pages.
Communicate with your entire community by posting a board-level announcement. Only want to show the announcement to a subset of your membership? Limit announcements by user group or by forum.
Communities benefit from self-awareness. When users can see who of their friends are online, they're more likely to stick around and interact with one another. More posts, more content, more page views, more revenue.
Going beyond just notifying users when they're quoted, Ape Estate uses @Username tags to let users ping and tag one another in posts. So instead of creating pedantic quote chains, users can engage in discussion by addressing one another directly.
Same page quick reply is old hat. Ape Estate features same-page quoting and multiquoting, so that users are never taken away from the topic. Not only that - posts can be previewed on the same page, and if a post is submitted before it's ready, it can be edited on the same page, too. The bottom line is this: We never take a user away from the content.
Users can tell at a glance whether they've read a topic or not, with icons to indicate whether the user has posted in a topic. When a user clicks into a topic they're taken directly to the last read post, making it easier than ever for hot topics to stay hot.
"Pa! Check the vBulletin Marketplace for a BBCode Desk Reference.
I've got to make a post!"
With Ape Estate's one-of-a-kind post editor, users see their posts formatted as
they will appear on the page, as they type. This means that your users can communicate
complex topics and format their posts however they choose without having to learn
esoteric programming languages like Markdown or BBCode.
Are you a BOFH? Sorry to disappoint you, but users of Ape Estate can change their avatars and aliases at will. That's right. At will. And they love it. And with our one-of-a-kind social focus, when they do change their alias, every post they've ever made or been mentioned in is instantly updated to reflect the change. Alias rot simply isn't a problem.
Friendly to your users, and friendly to long-tail searches. Ape Estate URLs are designed so that the complete topic title and forum name appear in the user's address bar. When topics are renamed or moved to new forums, the old URL will continue to work without issue.
What? Ape Estate uses the semantic features introduced with the W3C HTML5 specification so that search engines crawling your forum know what they're looking at. The rest? We've got that covered, too. Title text where it belongs, alt text on user-uploaded images, meta description tags so that your search results look good.
Want to monetize your audience? Easy! Choose from any of five locations within the forums to place your ads, and provide us with the javascript snippet responsible for serving up the ad. We don't want a cut, and we aren't a middleman or a broker. Forums is our business, so when it comes to advertising we give you the tools you need and we get out of your way.
Ape Estate goes hand-in-hand with Google Analytics. We take advantage of advanced analytics features like event tracking and goal measurement so that you can take stock in how your community is growing, and learn from how your users react to your changes. Give us your Google Analytics Key and we'll take care of the rest.
Find a theme to fit the tone of your forums from our selection of curated themes. Whether your forum is personal or professional, we have a theme for you.
Are forums only a small part of your business? Well, with Ape Estate it's easy to deliver forums underneath your own custom header and footer. Manage your HTML through our web interface and see your changes reflected immediately. Need to upload javascript? It's your forum. Go for it.
We know that sometimes, themes can only take you so far. If you're serious about customizing your forum, use our CSS editor to upload new CSS rules to your forums. Even better, since Ape Estate uses LESS, you can get 90% of the way towards customizing the look and feel by tweaking some simple variables.