About AVForums
Who are we?
AVForums.com is a totally free, UK based, independently
run resource for people interested in home consumer electronics. We cover all
areas of electronic home entertainment including home cinema, DVD, digital photography,
camcorders, video gaming, computer hardware and mobile phones. Remember our
name - AVForums.com - one word, with an s.
We are
- the largest AV home consumer electronics forum in the UK by a significant margin and
- the busiest home cinema forum in Europe
and we continue to grow at a remarkable rate.
We are not a retailer or manufacturer and so can remain unbiassed as an
organisation.
Since we are UK based, our membership has a large UK contingency. However, we
welcome people from all countries and strive to make everyone feel welcome.
We are not just visited by consumers, we are also visited by many retailers and manufacturers in the AV industry.
Home cinema enthusiast Stuart Wright, founded AVForums.com in 2000 and details of his own garage conversion can be found here. The forums are ably co-moderated by several long term forum members who help make this website a friendly place to visit. The feedback from our members is that they find the forums an excellent resource for home consumer electronics information and, indeed, entertainment.
History
AVForums.com started life as the forum of the
Home Cinema Choice website (UK home cinema magazine). The software used was
a very basic bulletin board service which was on trial in order to gauge the
interest in a forum community. The decision was made right away to employ a
code of good conduct so that AV enthusiasts of all ages and from all
walks of life could participate without being bombarded with spam or offensive
language.
By the summer of 2000 it was clear the forums were popular so we installed professional software to provide the features people were demanding. As time went on, we created new forums for separate categories of hardware such as Televisions and Speaker Systems.
Also the more technical Home Cinema PC and Video Processing forums were created
in order to satisfy the specific needs of the enthusiastic technically minded visitors. Here are the notable milestones:
| February 2000 |
Launch of AVForums.com |
| August 2001 |
Our 4,000 plus members were drawing too much resource from our shared
server. So we transferred to our own dedicated server. |
| October 2001 |
Installed the vBulletin software to satisfy our members' demands for more
features. |
| Summer 2004 |
Registration of our 25,000th member. This was indicative of a rapid growth
of the forums with new registrations reaching 70 per day towards the end
of the summer. |
| Q4 2004 |
Introduction of a links database, a TV guide, an AV news feed and a searchable
AV reviews and price comparison database. |
| January 2005 |
1 million posts |
| March 2005 |
Registration of our 50,000th member. New registrations passed 100 per
day. |
| January 2006 |
2 million posts and an upgrade to a new web server. |
| March 2006 |
100,000 members and launch of our Podcast. |
| September 2006 |
3 million posts |
| October 2006 |
Server upgrade : doubed the CPUs, memory and HDD |
| March 2007 |
4 million posts |
| September 2007 |
5 million posts |
| October 2007 |
Server upgrade : dedicated database server and 2 dedicated web servers
now used |
| November 2007 |
200,000 members |
| December 2007 |
Traffic exceeds one million unique visitors per month |
| March 2008 |
Launch of AVForums.tv video productions |
| August 2008 |
Server upgrade : second database server employed and both web servers
replaced |
| September 2008 |
7 million posts |
Editorial content
Have have been reporting on the AV news and publishing
DVD reviews for some years, but in 2006 we started producing audio podcasts
covering news, movie reviews and expert opinion on the AV industry. In 2007
we launched our hardware reviews, and in 2008 we started producing video news
coverage.
Future
We thank all our moderators, registered members and regular visitors for
their support and enthusiasm. The world of AV seems to get more exciting each year, and as we see the number of users continue to rise, we look forward
to sharing an exciting future with you at AVForums.com.
Thanks,
Stuart Wright,
M2N.
Link to us
We are always grateful for links to us. The url to use is http://www.avforums.com with descriptive text:
AVForums.com - the UK's biggest and best Audio Visual home consumer electronics discussion forums.
If you would like to use a graphic, please choose one of the following:
Preferred browser
Eagle-eyed readers may have noticed our 'optimised for Firefox Browser' link at the bottom of every page. Considering the serious security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer, as well as its non-compliance with the HTML standard, we encourage everyone to instead use a much safer and professionally written browser. Our preference is Firefox.
We are proud to be a member of the Home
Theater Alliance 
Click here to contact us.
Optimised for Firefox.
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