Some of you may be aware that I have a new project (Well, old site / new to me). I recently have gone into a partnership with Dan at MonksDiner.com. Since my involvement, the community design, traffic, and member registrations are starting to rise. I submitted our to Adminfusion to be reviewed for the Board of the Month contest they hold, and honestly, I completely forgot about the submission. Well, turns out that Monks Diner won, and below is what the folks at AdminFusion had to say:

This month we introduce to you Monks Diner, a forum for everything in Hollywood and Entertainment. Monks Diner is one of the biggest, if not the biggest, forums that we have reviewed since we started awarding the title of Forum of the Month. Most of the posts that you see in the 350,000+ post total are in a read-only forum, but there is still a very large amount in the live, active forums themselves.

The work that has been put into customizing, tweaking, and building Monks Diner is substantial. The header image fits the forum perfectly, the forum icons are unique, clean, and intriguing, and the modifications are numerous. Being that Monks Diner is a forum for anybody and everybody, the members are going to have a variety of interests, and there is plenty for people of all types to do there. It really encompasses the term “entertainment forums”. You’ll find an arcade, quizzes, a betting system, pictures, and Zoints profiles at Monks Diner. There are also many other interactive statistics and real-time data to look at such as the latest threads scrollbar and the statistics blocks near the bottom of the index.

Monks Diner is monetized wonderfully. If you’ll browse around, you will see Google Adsense placed all throughout the forums in various locations, but none of them are overwhelming or intrusive. They have successfully monetized their forums by maximizing exposure while also protecting the image of the forums. The design itself is very simple but different, and the navigation is very easy to follow.

Something else that we were impressed with was the lack of an Off Topic forum. Most forums today, regardless of subject, have an Off Topic forum for the members to talk about whatever they want even if it is unrelated to the central theme. This is not the case at Monks Diner, and most of the discussion is on topic because of this. The discussion is great. The members are extremely active and enjoy the forums. Take a look around the forums, because there’s so much to see. I (Ryan) actually enjoyed reading the Graphics Battles forum, because the friendly animosity was so entertaining.

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