Haha... well we are going off on a tangent here, but why not. I was active on PocketPCPassion forum (huge at the time) in 2003 when I bought a T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone Edition. The moderator there asked for a group of volunteers to develop an FAQ for it . About ten of us volunteered and when the work started, everyone scattered except me. The moderator (I found out later incorrectly) told me that they didn't want it on the Passion site. I figured if I was going to invest time and money in it, that I didn't want it to be tied to one device. I built a custom phpBB based script to serve up FAQs from a phpBB forum behind the scenes. I then went to finding frequent questions, putting them into the FAQ, and then posting a link to the answer when someone asked the question on the Passion site. Before long, my traffic became noticeable and the site owner entered the picture and tried to ban me from the site. I referred him to all the dialog with his moderator that asked me to do it, so he begrudgingly backed off. Over time, some feathers got ruffled with regular active members and moderators of the Passion site, and so a lot of the regulars jumped ship and came to my site and as new devices were coming out my forum took off. Not long after that, the Passion site crashed and turns out the owner didn't have a backup more recent than 6 months earlier, so that pretty much killed that site completely. I saw that happen to several big forums that crashed and never came back.
I was getting good share of Pocket PC / Windows Mobile traffic, but the other big platform, Palm, was dominated by a few other sites, the biggest being TreoCentral. I ended up investing quite a bit to convert to vBulletin, new creative design, more customization. I then aquired SmartphoneForums and SmartphoneSource, two Palm centric sites, to balance out my device traffic. TreoCentral proved to just be too dominant though, so we remained more Windows Mobile centric. Time passed... we continued to grow. Then the iPhone came out, along with Android around the same time. I was too busy with work and such to spend the time needed to try and maintain our level of traffic shifting completely to different platforms and so we started to slowly fade as time went on. A lot of our most active members moved to different forums like this one that had existing traffic for the other platforms. That's when I decided to get out... in mid 2011. The new owner decided to change the primary domain name to SmartphoneForums and kind of butchered it from an SEO point of view. They should have had a sophisticated redirect tool in place to maintain all the inbound links that became broken after he was done. I don't think there has been a real post there now in years. It was like watching a loved one die.
