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When is a forum community not a community? Let us know what you think would cause a forum to turn into something else besides a community. Is it bad if it transforms to something different?

Selecting forum moderators is crucial for maintaining a positive and productive community. Here’s a guide to help you choose the right moderators: 1. Define the Role Responsibilities: Outline what moderators will do, such as enforcing rules, resolving conflicts, and engaging with members. Authority: Specify the level of authority they will have, including the ability to delete posts, ban users, etc. 2. Set Criteria for Selection Experience: Look for candidates with experience in moderation or community management. Knowledge: Ensure they have a good understanding of the forum's topic. Communication Skills: They should possess strong written communication skills to interact effectively with users. 3. Seek Community Input Polls and Surveys: Ask community members for their opinions on potential moderators. Nominations: Allow users to nominate candidates they believe would be effective moderators. 4. Evaluate Candidates Activity Level: Check how active candidates are in the forum. Regular contributors are often more familiar with the community dynamics. Behavior: Assess their past behavior. Look for those who are respectful, helpful, and fair in discussions. 5. Conduct Interviews One-on-One Discussions: Interview candidates to understand their motivations, ideas for the forum, and conflict resolution strategies. Scenario-Based Questions: Present hypothetical situations to gauge their judgment and approach to moderation. 6. Trial Period Temporary Moderation: Consider appointing candidates on a trial basis to see how they perform in the role. Feedback Mechanism: Allow the community to provide feedback on the trial moderators. 7. Provide Training Guidelines and Policies: Ensure moderators are familiar with forum rules and moderation policies. Tools and Resources: Provide training on moderation tools and conflict resolution strategies. 8. Monitor Performance Regular Check-Ins: Schedule periodic reviews to discuss performance and address any concerns. Community Feedback: Continuously gather feedback from the community regarding the moderators' effectiveness. 9. Recognize and Reward Acknowledgment: Recognize the hard work of moderators publicly to boost morale. Incentives: Consider offering incentives such as badges, titles, or even small rewards for dedicated service. 10. Be Open to Change Reevaluation: Regularly reassess the moderation team and be willing to make changes if necessary. Adaptability: Stay flexible to adapt to the evolving needs of the community. By following these steps, you can select effective moderators who will help foster a welcoming and engaging forum environment.

In the old days a person could create a forum and drop a few links and almost instantly get users sign up. There were several niches that if you started a community in the niche the site would explode if you put a little work into it. I seen it happen time after time. That was in the peak of forum popularity. It's much harder to get a community off the ground today. It can be done. You have to work hard at it. Gone are the days of old and that's a good thing. Forums that have staff that actively contribute topics are more attractive to people that find the site. If you care about your forum community it will show. User will sign up and soon the community you nurtured along is popular.

You built your site. You're ready for the users to flock to the site. Next step to get the users to your site is to do some marketing and on SEO. Here are some effective SEO and marketing tips to enhance your online presence: SEO Tips Keyword Research: Use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush to identify relevant keywords for your niche. Focus on long-tail keywords for better targeting. On-Page SEO: Optimize title tags, meta descriptions, and headers with your target keywords. Use alt tags for images and ensure your content is easily readable. Quality Content: Create high-quality, informative, and engaging content that addresses user intent. Update your content regularly to keep it fresh and relevant. Mobile Optimization: Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as Google prioritizes mobile-first indexing. Page Speed: Optimize images, leverage browser caching, and minimize JavaScript to improve loading times. Backlinks: Build high-quality backlinks from reputable sites to improve your domain authority. Marketing Tips Social Media Engagement: Use platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn to engage with your audience. Share valuable content and interact with followers to build a community. Email Marketing: Build an email list and send regular newsletters with valuable content and promotions. Use segmentation to tailor your messages to different audience groups. Content Marketing: Create blogs, videos, infographics, and podcasts to attract and educate your audience. Utilize storytelling to make your content more relatable. Analytics and Tracking: Use tools like Google Analytics to track user behavior and measure the effectiveness of your campaigns. Adjust your strategies based on data insights. Paid Advertising: Consider pay-per-click (PPC) advertising on platforms like Google Ads and social media to reach a larger audience. A/B test your ads to determine what resonates best with your audience. Networking and Partnerships: Collaborate with influencers or other brands to expand your reach and credibility. Implementing these tips can help improve your SEO rankings and enhance your overall marketing strategy.

Creating a forum community can be a daunting task. Once you have the domain and everything is set up the way you like it's time to open. Here are some tips for forum admins to effectively manage their communities: Establish Clear Guidelines: Create and enforce clear community rules to maintain a respectful and constructive environment. Engage with Members: Actively participate in discussions to foster a sense of community and encourage members to engage. Moderation Team: Assemble a reliable team of moderators to help manage content and enforce rules consistently. Regular Updates: Keep the forum software and plugins updated to ensure security and enhance user experience. Feedback Mechanism: Implement a system for users to provide feedback on forum features and moderation. Promote Content: Highlight valuable posts or threads to encourage quality contributions. Encourage Introductions: Create a section for new members to introduce themselves, helping to build connections. Organize Events: Host contests, Q&A sessions, or webinars to increase engagement and interaction. Utilize Analytics: Monitor forum activity and user engagement using analytics tools to identify trends and areas for improvement. Be Transparent: Communicate openly about changes, policies, and decisions affecting the community. Conflict Resolution: Handle disputes promptly and fairly, ensuring all parties feel heard. Create FAQs: Develop a FAQ section to address common questions and reduce repetitive inquiries. By following these tips, forum admins can create a thriving, engaged community.

Generating content for your site can be approached in various effective ways. Here are some of the best methods: Blog Posts: Write informative articles or guides related to your niche. Use SEO techniques to optimize for search engines. User-Generated Content: Encourage your audience to submit their own content, such as reviews, testimonials, or stories. Visual Content: Create infographics, videos, or slideshows to convey information in a visually appealing way. Podcasts: Start a podcast series discussing topics relevant to your audience. Social Media Integration: Share content from your social media platforms and engage with your audience to generate discussions. Email Newsletters: Send regular updates or curated content to your subscribers to keep them engaged. Webinars and Live Events: Host webinars or live Q&A sessions to provide value and interact with your audience in real-time. Surveys and Polls: Conduct surveys to understand what your audience wants and create content based on their feedback. Collaborations: Partner with influencers or other brands to create joint content that reaches a wider audience. Content Repurposing: Take existing content and adapt it into different formats (e.g., turning a blog post into a video). These are all great tips and by combining these strategies, you can create diverse and engaging content that resonates with your audience and enhances your site’s visibility.

I want to apologize for the downtime. I was in Tennessee looking at property. The power was not fully restored when I left. I though the back up power would hold things together in between. It didn't. Site went offline on Tuesday as I was doing an upgrade. I wasn't able to access the server until this morning when I got home. Power was still off. It came back at about 1630ET. It still up and down. Backup generator is keeping up this time. Thanks for understanding

I would like to start a community forum built on Invision Community v5. I have the license and the servers. What is needed is the topic for the forum and the domain. I did this once before when I was an admin at TAZ. We created a general discussion forum. It was very popular and when we closed it it had over a millions posts. I think a talented group of admins like the ones we have here could build a great community. Let's use this thread to brainstorm and come up with a topic and domain. Who wants to join me?

Current Projects - October 2024 Welcome to our second edition of Current Projects, a monthly newsletter about what we’re currently working on at Discourse. Your questions and feedback are welcome! Kicking off Composer redesign Our composer redesign project is still in its early stages, but we’re getting closer to defining our design direction and choosing the libraries that we’ll be building upon. After evaluating our options, three contenders bubbled to the top: Lexical, ProseMirror, and TipTap. We did some earlier prototyping with Lexical, but ProseMirror looks compelling, and its recent adoption by some larger projects addresses some of our earlier concerns about it. We are currently working on a prototype based on ProseMirror to validate some assumptions we have about what that integration would look like. A new look and feel config page Our work on a new theme chooser is evolving into a slightly larger project to create a more streamlined config page in the admin interface for customizing the look abd feel of a Discourse site. In addition to giving admins on new sites an easier and more visual way to choose from a small set of selected themes, we’ll also be looking at how sites configure theme components, color schemes, and related settings. We are close to landing an initial pull request for this new page, which will remain hidden until it is in a state where we’re ready to roll it out more widely. In full swing Admin interface design consistency We’ve arrived at some new patterns for the design of config pages within the admin interface, that group related sites settings and other configuration together in on applying our new guidelines to the pages we’ve recently added for the new about page and custom user fields. Switching our hosted plans to browser page view metrics We’re working on rolling out our new page view metrics for our hosted plans, and updating plan limits accordingly, so that traffic from bots and crawlers will no longer be counted as page views towards a site’s usage, relieving site admins of the responsibility to manage that traffic. Simplifying invites We’re making invites more discoverable and simplifying some of the more common flows for inviting users. AI summaries for hot topics We’re still in the thick of our work to add an experimental feature to allow sites to include short summaries of topics on the hot topic list itself. We’re close to landing an initial change to allow topics to store multiple types of summaries, each using a different prompt. New full screen pages for signup and login We’re following up on our earlier improvements to signup and login and changing these screens from modals to full screen pages. We’ve merged this new feature behind the experimental_full_page_login feature flag for backwards compatibility with existing themes that customize these screens while they make updates to be compatible with the new pages. Ability to limit where Personas can interact and which LLMs they can use We’re working on a change to limit where individual AI personas can interact and which LLMs they can use. This enables you to create more limited personas that are available to larger groups of members while managing costs. A more extensible topic list We’re continuing to work on a new topic list implementation with a focus on extensibility developer experience. We have been testing this internally since May and our next goal is to be in a state where we can start testing the new implementation on Meta. We are in the process of updating many themes and plugins to use new APIs, in order to take that next step towards rolling it out more widely, Wrapping up New about page design We recently shipped a new design for the about page behind a feature flag. We’re still tidying up a few loose ends but will soon be unconditionally switching sites over to the new design. Learn more… Allowing chat threads in direct messages We’ve added the ability to turn on threading in chat direct messages, to enable more structured conversations among small groups when they need it. Switching themes and plugins from yarn to pnpm Following up on our recent work to switch core over from yarn to pnpm, which brings gains in speed and storage requirements for building Discourse, we’ve been doing the same within all of the themes and plugins that we maintain. Add upload support to custom AI tools Custom AI tools now support uploaded documents, and an API to search them, enabling you to create tools with access to additional knowledge for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that multiple personas can access. Ability to flag and hide posts as spam with AI triage automation We’ve added the ability to flag posts as spam with the AI triage automation, which also hides the post automatically. Previously, we only allowed individual posts to be sent to the review queue or entire topics to be hidden. 1 post - 1 participant Read full topic View the full article

I have created 2 new user groups. They are: VIP Visiting Admin The visiting admin group is for admins from other sites that are active participants here. The VIP group is for members that actively participate in the discussions, create new topics and contribute articles. Members promoted to this group will get extra privileges and get a shiny badge to denote that they are indeed VIP's. If you have any questions I'll answer them.

Welcome to the new and revamped Forum Forum - A Community for Forum Enthusiasts. In the next few days I will be upgrading the site to xenForo 2.3. and installing a link directory for you to submit your sites. Take the time to browse a bit. If you want to get in on the ground floor register an account. Hope you enjoy you're time here.

Invision Community v5 takes a fresh approach to tagging and content discovery. It overhauls the concept to bring content across different sections together with a beautiful new tag page. Tagging is a powerful concept but underused with Invision Community 4 due to overly complex interfaces in different areas of the suite, a confusing open tagging model option and no real benefit in content discovery beyond a simple list of content items. A driving force behind Invision Community 5 is the question of how we can help time-pressured community members find the content that most interests them. Invision Community has robust taxonomy through forum and category structures, but what about content in less visible areas such as Blogs, galleries or Events? How can we bring those together to homogenise the type of content and focus on the content itself? Taxonomy via tagging across all applications in the community suite is the answer. However, we needed to re-approach how tagging was implemented in the Invision Community to bring our new vision to life. Out with the old The current tagging system is implemented loosely, allowing open tagging, which is more akin to hashtags than high-level taxonomy. Allowing forums, albums, and blog categories to define their own tags turns tagging into more of a status label, which does nothing to help bring disparate content together. In with the new With a new focus on taxonomy and content discovery, we set about rebuilding tagging for Invision Community 5. The UI to tag items is the same, but now each defined, globally available tag has its own page with cover image and ability to feature items within that tag page. A uniform approach to different content items in the UI breaks down the barrier between content types and focuses solely on the content. Tags featured on its page are automatically displayed on the community Featured Content page. Finally, tags can now be followed, allowing your community to get a daily or weekly digest of all new tagged items, bringing people back to read more of the content they love. Let’s take a closer look In Invision Community 5, all tags are defined in the Admin Control Panel. The ability to use open tagging and per-node tags has been removed, but don’t worry—the upgrade system will offer conversion for those tags. Once defined, the tags are available for all content types and feature on a dedicated new tag page. This page features cover photos and more information on the tag via a description. Content from across your suite will be displayed on this page. If a single piece of content has multiple tags, it will appear on every relevant tag page making it easy to have content in multiple areas. If you want to permanently or temporarily feature individual content, perhaps your latest news or product release, you can do so right from the tag page. Featured content will show on the community’s Featured Content Page. Blurring the lines Now that we have an attractive and focused page for each tag, we can start to blur the lines between applications and, indeed, forums and categories, offering a new way to organise content. For some communities, the need for multiple forums to categorise content is diminished, and instead, tagging can be used to separate and find content from across the community. Tags can be featured in the menu system, offering new ways into your community for new visitors, regular community members, and even those who visit daily. Invision Community 5 is fearless in challenging past decisions or streamlining features to make them stronger and more focused. Our new approach to tagging takes a vague and underutilised concept and pushes it front and centre in any content strategy. How will you use it in your community? Continue reading...

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