JoelR

Some thoughts:

1. I wanted to come back to this topic maybe not quite with the exact angle of the OP, but to point out that a lot of times, we try to be too welcoming.  

Everyone is invited to join!

All are welcome! 

I know I'm guilty of using these phrases myself, but in many cases, no, we're not actually interested in certain people joining.  If you're a dog forum, maybe you're only focused on professional dog breeders of one breed.  You don't want new dog breeders, you don't want other types of dogs, and you definitely don't want snake owners.  We try so hard to onboard as many new users that we don't set the right expectations up front of who should be within the community, and who should not.  

2. To return to the heart of the OP, I think another way of asking the question is if you are proud of your community members? 

There are some communities out there that allow deviant, unprofessional, or immature behavior.  They allow or even encourage that kind of behavior (hello 8chan!).  

This is where community standards and social expectations come in, where I don't think forums have advanced our toolkit. When you're in public and do something dumb, people will give you weird looks or walk away.  We don't have the same tools to manifest social shaming, which is powerful in keeping large groups of people in collective behavior. 

When you are small, i think it's important to define who you are building the community for (as well as who you aren't building for).  

As you get larger, you naturally start to approach the average person in society. 

There's a concept called Universal Basic Income (UBI). 

Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI and Tools for Humanity, proposed a twist.  What if every person was offered universal basic compute, and what if every person could get a portion of that computing power, resell it, donate it? In the future, do you think access to AI should be a social good? 

Inspired by this article: https://cointelegraph.com/news/sam-altman-slice-gpt-pay-ubi-artificial-intelligence

Those are all great suggestions @envy, and I know users have asked about footers in the past.  Encourage you to post in the Feedback forum on the official IPS client forums (https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/)

Also, as an exclusive sneak peek at Invision Community 5 alpha, I put together a mash-up clip of the next generation of the community suite.  

 

A sneak peek at some features in Invision 5 that you might have a strong opinion about.  

What do you think about each of these?

Vertical Menu

The classic menu from v4 was always horizontal across the top of the screen, similar to most other websites and forums.  

In IPS v4, admins have the option of switching to a Vertical Menu, similar to Opera, Reddit, Edge and other popular platforms.

Search Box 

The Search Box on desktop actually opens up a search modal popup.  

What do you think?  Do you like the additional options before you search, or do you think this is misleading design?  

Card view of Forum Index

IPS introduced their fourth layout (!) for the forum index: card view. 

Users see a hybrid combination of a large thumbnail and recent topics

I recently came across a new forum, where the forum admin wanted to focus on health because of a personal interest in entering healthcare.  

She created over 50 boards in 7 categories for all things related to health: everything from medical equipment and hospital administration to fitness and exercise, mental health, community and public health, pharmaceuticals, alternative medicine, occupational health, and women's and men's and geriatric and pediatric health.  It was everything!

There was very little expertise or mastery shown in any of the boards, much less activity. 

Even if the forum admin personally pursued a career in healthcare, nobody would ever have the range of expertise for all of these.  You specialize in a particular field or focus.  Her approach to the community is the 90% / 10% approach, where she was attempting to cover as broad of health (the 90%) at a very superficial level (only 10% deep).

The reality is that the 90% / 10% approach is completely unattainable for new and independent communities.  You cannot compete with the 'billion-dollar' platforms like Reddit, Facebook, etc. They've swallowed up shallow, everyday conversations.      

Where independent communities can still win is by flipping the focus.  Go for the 10% / 90% approach: 

• Focus on the tightest, most specialized niche and demonstrate mastery, expertise, authority, timeliness, or some other value that is unmatched by anyone else.
• Instead of being shallow, go as deep as possible.  Capture 90% of the knowledge and long-tail discussion for that one specific niche and be amazing at it.

One of the biggest factors that initially attracted me to IPS is not that they develop a forum.  There are plenty of other organizations and companies that develop bulletin boards, forums, and discussions across multiple platforms.  What attracted me is that IPS gave me the ability to build things outside of my forum, and that's always been part of my strategy.  In my main community, over 90% of my site's traffic does not flow through my forums; it runs through my other content hubs (like Gallery and Downloads). The Forums app is incredibly powerful at retaining existing members and giving them a sense of community - it's literally the gathering place for returning members to mingle and chat - but for new members or single-purpose users, it's the rest of my community that attracts.   

Pages is incredibly powerful.  I've always believed that it is, hands-down, the most powerful application in the IPS ecosystem but also the one that most clients never understand.  

On Invisioneer, we've used the database features of Pages to create multiple resource hubs: https://www.invisioneer.org/resources/.  Except for Courses (which uses the actual IPS app for Courses), all of the others are developed using the database feature of Pages.  

If you are a new or an existing IPS client, I encourage you to gain as much familiarity with the Pages app as possible.  Your mind will be blown at the kinds of things you can do to build content sections of articles, guides, directories, and more.  

On 5/1/2024 at 7:17 AM, Kane said:

Just like most people, I am also focusing on numbers, I want more members, more activities, and more traffic. My long term goal is to build a dedicated marketplace within my community.

One thing I'd like to point out is building a dedicated marketplace is not the same as attracting more members.  

If you're building a marketplace, you might be focused on initiatives like: reaching and attracting sellers, onboarding their products, and offering tools to organize and filter and search.  That's not the same as simply attracting more members, which you can pursue through things like referrals, promotion, etc.  

The sharper that you can define your initiative, the easier it will be for you to actually implement.  

5 hours ago, Nomad said:

I am running a community on Business, Finance and Investment niche. I am not an expert on these topics but I have studied these topics in the university and I have own multiple businesses in the past. When I share, I do not share expert advice, I share what I know best from my own experience and knowledge. I am trying to build my community for experts as well as general users interested in these niches.

Those are very broad topics.  For just Finance, I can think of multiple subtopics ... Personal finance, credit cards, mortgages, corporate finance, real estate, crypto, retirement planning, healthcare finance, etc. 

How do you build a community when youre so broad? 

What differentiates you from Reddit, which has threads on each of these topics (with many more users)? 

I find a lot of new or legacy admins try to overly focus on activity: more members, more posts, more topics. Those are all great, but those goals are a consequence of underlying actions and they don't address the tactics needed to make that happen.  What is their plan to generate X new topics every month? What is their plan to attract X new members? 

I find that focusing on goals with concrete, identifiable metrics is more valuable.  This month, I want to create X new resources in the research paper section.  Next month, I want to create Y new links in other section.  

8 hours ago, Kane said:

You can monetize your community through multiple methods, running network ads or selling memberships are some of the common ways to monetize your communities. You can also use affiliate ads or sell merch. No matter what monetization method you are using, you need a lot of users and traffic on your site.

I disagree.  

You can make $1000 / mo by ... 

- Selling $0.01 ads to display to 100,000 people

- Selling a $100 course to 10 people 

In the second case, you don't actually need a lot of traffic or a lot of users.  You literally only need 10 people! But the value that you provide needs to be high value, specialized and worthwhile.  

7 hours ago, Dilip said:

In the last project I did SEO for, we were able to bring INP to green. 😄

In fact, we were continuously hitting 90+ for all 4 web vitals.

Nice! Just curious, what were a few of the things that you did to bring INP to a higher score ?

7 hours ago, Kane said:

Zero click searches are becoming very popular but I do not think this is a threat to website owners who focuses on ranking on search engines and getting traffic from search engines. Zero click searches are only for short piece of information. For instance, if you just wan t to know when was Lincoln born, you do not have to visit multiple pages. But if you need more information on Lincoln, you will have to click on search results.

Yes

I know it sounds contradictory that there will be both more zero click searches AND more long tail searches, but AI is going to force communities with expert advice to offer extremely deep long long tail discussions.  

What Facebook did to social conversation, AI will do to general knowledge.  

Communities are special in that we intentionally try to foster a sense of belongings and togetherness.  That usually also usually implies a standard to engage in civilized discourse.  

How do you encourage - or enforce - civilized discourse among members? 

When I think about the onboarding process of most communities, they're remarkably bad about letting you know about expectations. They either offer instant sign on where you totally bypass anything*, or you're presented with a wall of legalese terms .  If you're lucky, you get a forcefully cheery email that explains where the Introduction board is.  

Why don't we have friendly, custom reminders before you post with some simple guidelines? 

How do we provide behavioral nudges, not punitive slapdowns, for members to be thoughtful before posting?

Some interesting thoughts that there will be more zero click searches, more long tail searches, and why discussion forums with our UGC driven expert discussion are uniquely positioned to win.  

https://searchengineland.com/future-seo-ai-powered-world-440023

What is Interaction to Next Paint (INP)?

Google uses INP to assess your site’s overall responsiveness. If you click on a drop-down menu and there’s a delay with its opening, this latency shows poor responsiveness and relates to INP.

If there are issues with INP, user experience suffers because the user may continue clicking on your site’s menu, waiting for a response.

INP is the time it takes from the initial user interaction and when the next frame on the site is painted.

https://searchengineland.com/optimizing-inp-interaction-to-next-paint-440017

I think if you're active in the IPS community, let clients know that you're available and open to private work, you will have people who want to reach out to you.  The IPS client base is so large and there's always a demand for customization.  

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.