JoelR

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I have no idea what your niche is about, but some general questions for you to think about: What is the total universe for your audience? And are you approaching a limit of that? (For example, in some niches, there may only be 10,000 total people. And the number of people who will post in forums in that niche will be 1,000). It's a numbers game at a certain point. For example, even before I started Invisioneer, I had a rough estimate of the number of IPS clients. Then I took a percentage of that as my total audience that I would aim for in 2 - 3 years. Can you monetize your site? For example, can you offer resources / tips / interviews / photos / insider information in a way that provides value to people in your niche? I've never liked to look at measures like 'traffic,' which is an activity metric and a consequence of investments in your resources. Are there resources that you can invest in, such as guides, interviews, photos, documents, outlines, instruction manuals, beginner handbooks, John Horton's Best of 2023 Year in Review, etc. that maybe you can bring someone in to help you develop and publish?

Money is a tool. It can help you accelerate your plans, by hiring people to do things that you can't (or don't have time!) to do yourself. With that said, in my other main community - which has 50,000 members - I never spent any money for about the first 5 years of it. It was all myself and one other volunteer. No moderators, no other admins, no staff. Looking back, I probably should have spent money sooner but I never really thought about paid work until the last couple of years - and the lightbulb went off. I'm now much more strategic with using money as a tool, to help me scale, to help me accelerate, and to help me do things that I don't have the time to do. But it's tightly controlled and I have clear outcomes of what should happen with that money.

Most communities do backups, but those can be stored on the same server. This means if there's a hardware or firmware failure on the server, both the site and the backups are taken down. Remote backups are backups stored in a completely different server, usually with a different company and maybe even a different geographic location.

I think the best way to view 'old topics' is through timeliness: Is there value in allowing new discussion, or is there actually harm in allowing in allowing new discussion on an old topic? Is there value in allowing fragmented discussion with large breaks, or am I better off encouraging members to simply start a new topic? To be more advanced, instead of punishing users, how can we proactively educate them on the risks or dangers of old content? Or perhaps provide alternatives to newer or fresher content?

This is a really interesting comment, because I actually think community building and modern online discussions can be sexy. (Okay, sexy might be a stretch, but I find it fascinating). For example, How do we approach social and casual conversations differently from 'success conversations' (where there's a question or request)? How do we place value - and what kinds of value - on authoritativeness, expertise, and timeliness? How do we approach and nurture new members vs returning members vs power users? How do we truncate or summarize or break apart long discussions? There are so many questions! There's a lot of psychology, a lot of behavioral design, a lot of organizational management, and a lot of undefined answers that have yet to be built for independent communities. Then you expand all of this to the entirety of Invision Community, where you can host live events, where you can build databases of reference materials, where people can chronicle their personal journals in blogs, you can start to achieve some really wonderful things.

Real question 🤔 LOL

Wow congrats!!

Just curious, have you heard of Code Canyon or Envato Market?

Geocities was so cool!

There was a Marketplace mod that allowed reactions in certain boards. Pinging @Adriano Faria

Well, I'm a real example of someone who has a lawyer on retainer for my "hobby website." He helped me review my website terms, assessed my entire website, and helped me with countering legal requests. Once you hit a certain size or popularity - even if you're a hobby website - the legal risks can become too much to ignore.

Open tags can become a hot mess very quickly. Closed tags, which you define in advance and can offer per category, can make a lot of sense. It's an easy way to provide another level of organization within your forum boards.

No egress fees on Wasabi, which is why the setup is so good. I literally only pay for storage.

I know this reason is brought up over and over again as one of the scary risks of social media communities, but ... How often does it actually happen? Are you building a community that contains illegal, dangerous, or treasonous content? You honestly have the risk of being shut down by ANY provider.

I've experimented with Courses (on this cloud install for Invisioneer). As of right now, you're not missing much. It's very, very basic. There are very few true LMS features. With that said thought, I like the direction that IPS is going in helping content creators and community builders tap into their audience. This was a very smart strategic move.

Really interesting thoughts! Totally agree with your points. For the raffles / giveaways, have you thought about relying on the built in Leaderboard to help you run simple contests?

Totally agree. On my main community (not Invisioneer), it's very media heavy and I store hundreds of gigabytes in Wasabi. If I stored on Amazon, it would be hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. The benefit of the Backblaze + Cloudflare setup is not so much the savings on the storage, but the savings on bandwidth.

I'm going to ask the question another way: Are you willing to pay someone to help you expand your database of content, your reference material, your authoritativeness in your niche? I know the OP was discussing paid discussions, but I think the real conversation should be broader: money is a tool. Can you use that tool to help accelerate and do things that you can't do yourself?

A question back to you: how do you know if another user has first hand experience? And just because a user doesn't have first hand experience, does that lessen or reduce her observations and thoughts on that topic?

I differentiate between "focused browsing" versus "freeform browsing". Focused browsing: you have a set of tasks that you need to consistently complete, maybe every day or every week, you're trying to be efficient, you know what areas of the site you need to browse. This makes sense to do on desktop to be as efficient as possible. Freeform browsing: no particular goal, you view one topic at a time and read or reply at your leisure. This makes sense to do on mobile. As admins or staff members, we are usually "focused browsing." But we need to constantly remind ourselves that our users, who are much more casual, are "freeform browsing."

I'm nominating this post for most interesting thought of the week because it opens up so many questions that drive to the heart of modern community discussion ... How do you tell when users are an expert or not? What is the difference between a user giving opinion, giving their experience, or giving advice? Everyone's opinions are welcome, but are everyone's opinions weighted the same? I actually think this is one of the areas that modern communities need to start thinking about more deeply. Legacy communities used badges and ranks based on activity, which is unrelated to expertise or authoritativeness. This is also especially problematic for topics related to health, wellness, or technical fields. For example, on my Xenforo demo site ForumExplorers, users are asking questions about depression. I'm not sure other forum admins are the appropriate people to offer any kind of medical advice on depression. Yes, they can offer their personal experiences, they can offer their perspectives and opinions, but it can actually harm users more with wrong but well intentioned discussion.

What's wrong with ckeditor?

This is a really interesting question, and I always think of threats through a variety of factors: - Internal threats - External threats - Technology threats - Social, legal, or member threats There are risk factors in each of these categories. It's hard to identify the biggest!

I use Wasabi. It did have stability several years ago, but it's been fine for several years now. It grew too fast in the early days. For HTML 5 players, if I remember there is only one mod by @Nathan Explosion. Overall, if your goal is to grow a video streaming site, I would caution you. Invision Community is not designed for video streaming. The user downloads the files, and then simply plays back to the user, similar to how a user downloads a PDF. There is no built-in technology designed for streaming, encoding, bandwidth buffering, etc. This sounds like a very interesting project though!