Topic: DealMinded.com: PunBB backend for headlines, blogs, forum...
I'm putting the finishing touches on DealMinded.com and wanted to give you guys a chance to knock on it for a while before I release it to the masses. It uses PunBB with some customization beyond styling (of course), WordPress templates, and the Tango caching class for PHP.
If you're a bargain hunter, I think you'll find the premise of this site very interesting. Instead of being scolded for posting deals with affiliate/referral links, you're rewarded. To make a long story short, after earning $1,000 in about 3 days on my other site getting a meager 1000 clicks a day, I realized that there's a lot of money in posting deals. However, on other deal sites, you're told not to post affiliate links, because the deal site wants to parse that link and add it's own affiliate information. That means deal sites are making $1000s-10,000s a day on the deals that users work very hard to find, research, write-up, and post! And the users get nothing in return other than "rep points". This isn't right.
If DealMinded could gain some popularity, I would not find it hard to believe that users could make hundreds of dollars, maybe more, a day, just by posting quality deals.
By the way, when I say "deal site", I don't mean posting the same coupons everyone posts just because they are affiliates for jacked-up-prices.com; I mean actual, best-price-anywhere, often-times-unadvertised, sometimes-price-mistaken deals!
One neat thing about the site is that when users post to the site, it automatically generates a customizable blog, in case they want to do more focused advertising; for example, post links and feeds on their MySpace or Facebook pages to their site. For example, my personal blog is here: http://www.dealminded.com/user/jeff/
If any of you sign up, send me a message and let me know where you heard about the site from - or message me here; I'd be happy to help get you involved, if you need it.
Jeff.