JoelR

Time, expertise, trust, convenience, money, features. What else?

Several years ago, there was a big push by professional community managers into understanding and implementing gamification. Now, most professional community managers shun gamification as a major feature. My personal take is the elements of gamification (which are nothing more than behavioral psychology) are still valuable: - Encouraging users to compete or race against another - Rewarding users as they progress - Setting challenges or goals And there are multiple areas in the community to implement these steps. It's not just badges and titles, but being thoughtful with your language strings and notifications and emails.

I'm a big fan of purchasing 3rd party apps and a believer that modifications are a strategic advantage for independent communities. I can only speak for myself. I am definitely holding off on any new purchase or custom requests on v4. I also probably won't do anything for the first 6-9 months of v5 to allow the platform to mature (and I tend to be an early adopter).

What a great way to support your friend!

The concept of community everywhere is not that you need to necessarily participate on all platforms for your audience, but that you don't bother with an owned community and you build a community where your members are already gathering. For example, if you're a video game developer and if your users are already on Discord, you build your brand community on Discord.

A theme definitely has a certain strategy to it. I can totally understand communities of gaming, pop culture, entertainment, media, or similar having a very vivid theme. At the same time, I also think there's value in simplicity, and purposely letting the focus be on the content and not the visuals.

The way that you frame the question makes it sound as if monetization has to run counter to the user experience. I'd like to flip the question, and ask, how can you offer monetization to improve the user experience? If you can answer this question, then you will have a monetization strategy that aligns with your members and your strategy. What can you offer that empowers your members better? And sell that.

The classic and most well-known elements to build a sense of community have 4 elements: membership, influence, fulfillment of needs, and shared emotional connection.

This is going to depend on how mature the platform is. Paid forum services usually support a conversion from a competitor software, or you can always do a custom conversion.

No activity is then your equilibrium. I'm assuming you are not satisfied with your equilibrium (and nobody is, there's always too much of something or too little or something). The real question is, what are the systems you are building to generate sustained activity in your topic?

The purpose of Invisioneer is to help communities of all sizes and shapes succeed, but there's a special place in my heart for small, independent communities. Usually these are started and fueled by the passion of the community owner. One of the biggest strengths of forums is passion. One of the biggest weaknesses is passion. Passion from an independent community owner means that you will be able to research, share, discuss with a fiery enthusiasm that can truly distinguish your forum from other forums. Passion means you will push yourself, care for all of the details. Passion also means you can quickly burn out. You can only self sustain an intense burst for a very short time, so it's important to build a support structure for when passion can't keep you moving. What does this mean in practice for small, independent forums? - Back your passion with discipline: Although passion can be amazing to motivate you, it can't be the only way you keep yourself going. That's when discipline should kick-in. This means first giving yourself a little grace and forgiveness, and then recognize that forums are a long game where the small steps matter as much as the big leaps. This could mean keeping a diary of your forum journey, building a content calendar, or coming up with a simple posting schedule. - Leverage technology: some forums such as Invision Community allow you to schedule new topics. This allows you to pre-plan, brainstorm and write an entire weeks worth of conversations and insights, without trying to do all of that every single day. - Leverage people: Tap into trusted friends or superusers to help you sustain your initiative or objective. Be very clear, be very detailed, and let them execute on your strategy when you may not have the time or energy to do it yourself. Many small, independent forums start entirely with the passion and interest of the owner. That's great. The next step is to build the systems to support your strategy when passion alone won't do it.

Community Expert One is the email invitation and the other is what it looks like in the forums. (Ignore what Ehren is talking about. A user was asking about the layout of the staff page. The key thing is the new community experts follow button.)

Congrats! That's huge. What does it look like?

Is your community stuck in a rut and not engaging? Jono Bacon dives into 5 reasons why and the practical steps to fix them

By the way I foudn this as a (paid) Cloudflare service: https://developers.cloudflare.com/support/more-dashboard-apps/cloudflare-stream/delivering-videos-with-cloudflare/