Christian Forums

History & Information

ChristianForums.com is the largest online community for Christians in the world, started in the early 2000s. In 2015, I negotiated the purchase of Christian Forums from the current owner and for the company Group Net, LLC of which I was the Webmaster and Chief Operating Officer.

At the time of the purchase, Christian Forums was running on an outdated version of vBulletin and faced serious issues with reliability, as well as security conerns due to the now unsupported code base.

Within three months of our purchase being finalized, I worked to move Christian Forums to a modern code base, powered by XenForo.

• Converted over 60GB of MySQL data from the vBulletin platform to the XenForo platform while documenting and troubleshooting the migration locally before doing the final live migration.

• Worked with XenForo developers to migrate custom vBulletin plugin code to XenForo compatiable code.

• Worked with an XenForo designer to develop a custom theme that would bring a fresh and modern look to the website, while bringing a mobile first design to Christian Forums for the first time.

• Moved Christian Forums on to a dedicated web server powered by CentminMod. Optimized specifically for high PHP and MySQL throughput.

• Developed a monetization platform on Google Ad Manager using 3rd party ad networks. Eventually would move to AdThrive and see our revenue increase by nearly 100 percent.

Through our ownership of Christian Forums, I implemented SEO best practices, engadged with the community to solicit feedback for new features, implemented the features, created a social network presence and began marketing, and worked with the volunteer administrators and moderators to provide new tools to ensure that the community remained a safe and friendly place for members.

In July of 2022, I negotiated the sale of Christian Forums, along with ChristianityBoard.com.