JoelR

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/

You would be serving from BackBlaze via your Cloudflare proxy exactly as you mentioned. But if you're using Cloudflare as a proxy on any plan except the enterprise , Cloudflare will impose a 100 MB upload limit. I've reinforced this limit in my community (by capping download files at 100 MB, for example). https://community.cloudflare.com/t/upload-size/386443 In terms of the user experience, just be aware that your IPS system will be downloading the entirety of that file of 3 GB and 4 GB. It's not seamless video streaming with fancy multi-encoding, variable bitrate, etc. It's a simple file downsize to the user's browser, as in, the user must download the full 3 GBs before it will start playing. IPS is not a video delivery system. It's a file system of simple uploads and downloads. Just want to be very clear about that.

In any ecosystem, there is an equilibrium that is naturally achieved when left to it's own. The same applies to a community. When left by itself, what is the natural state of your community? Does the community tend to have too much of a certain kind of conversation? Does it have enough conversation and content to be self sustaining? Part of the role of a community manager is to nudge the community's equilibrium in the right direction, until the community can achieve its equilibrium on its own.

Forum Topic

Vertical Menu

Profile Notice new navigation elements of horizontal scrolling (I'm on desktop with a resized window, so it's not a perfect replacement, but you should get the point) Profile .webm

Card View Card View(1).webm

Account Settings > Content Preferences More options than ever before for each user to choose, especially for the new Forum Index view and Topic View

Light Mode & Dark Mode Light vs Dark Mode.webm

Pages is one of the thing IPS is keeping mum about so far. No news about Pages at all, and it's not something we can test on the alpha. I also heard that they will be rolling Blogs into Pages, so I'm looking forward to that change too. From what I can tell of the other apps, they seem to work and function exactly like before. Gallery, Downloads, Calendar, Clubs, etc.

Yes I will! In the meantime, you can check out my post in the IPS community with several screenshots: https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/477839-invision-community-5-alpha-first-look/

I've been given a sneak peek at Alpha for the last few days. 1. IPS has done a good job already talking about new features in the company blog. Some of the biggest changes that you can't help but notice are: Dark Mode, Card View, and the Vertical Menu. 2. The default theme feels fast. Like, super fast. The flyouts of the menus, switching between sections, everything feels zippy. 3. IPS is saving some juicy, juicy tidbits. The new editor. Page builder. None of us have been able to play with the new page builder, but if you've struggled with building a landing page of different designs, this should be a game changer. The new editor looks and feels very familiar, even if it's built in something totally different. No other forum provider has a robust set of tools to build pages like IPS, and I think the new Page Builder in 5 will continue to differentiate IPS as a site builder around your community.

You're the community admin with a strong desire to be helpful, but could you actually be undermining your community's growth and performance? What are some of your best intentions that backfired? Do you seek constant agreement, or lurch from one member feedback to another? Do you overprotect your staff members, and keep them in the dark? Are you too involved in every matter as a micromanager, or are you not involved at all?

Community admins overestimate their community. Our members MUST love our community; all members are welcome to speak freely and openly and critically. Everyone has Invisioneer booked as their homepage, right? But the reality is often different. The majority of members are indifferent, and staff members or superusers may actually hold on to simmering concerns within the community. Given that our communities are digital and remote, how do we build more psychological safety for our members and tackle these perception gaps?

There is such a broad range of conflict that it's hard to find a one-size-fits-all solution, but there are some good questions that can be asked back in helping to guide you: What is the scope of the conflict and who is involved? What is their past history of contributions? Is there spillover to the rest of the community? Does this impact or touch upon my community's culture? Is there a precedent for this? How quickly or decisively does this need to be resolved?

I saw this post yesterday, but didn't want to respond because I wanted to think more deeply and thoughtfully. Encouraging collaboration is hard. This speaks to group psychology and the innate empathy (or lack thereof) of humans. I haven't seen best practices here but I do think community admins should aim for the following: Be clear in their introduction about people helping other people. This really isn't emphasized enough. When I join forums (and I've joined a lot), the welcome message is usually fixated on where to go to post, where to go to ask for help, etc. They really speak to the spirit of collaboration that underpins the purpose of the community You periodically talk about it as a community admin. Culture is something that needs to be actively voiced, and then executed upon. It's not something tha you need to post a weekly update on, but to periodically highlight a great answer or response from the community, or collaborative initiative or feedback that was provided. There are technical innovations being developed. In IPS, they've been aggressively rolling out features related to expertise - features such as Mark as Solution, Community Expert, Staff Member, Q&A, etc. These features will allow a technical highlight of questions that are unanswered, invite in experts to answer, and reward expert users.

Most forums attempt to do that with our different membergroups, and we've been partitioning our users since the beginning of time. But HOW we've been partitioning our membergroups has no evolved at all. We are still using legacy methods of promoting members based on very shallow factors: Total activity - regardless of whether or not the activity is helpful, useful, informative, or expert. Total time - regardless of whether or not the member has actually contributed anything meaningful in that timeframe While these were appropriate factors in the early days of forums (as the ONLY ways to separate members), I think we need to become better at offering pathways based on meaningful impact.

I think most admins fall into that trap, the follow through and execution and impact is much more nuanced to the different types of members.