Discussion

Hi, I miss the friendly number format app. It seems that is too hard to redo for the entire suite. Would anyone be willing to create a custom widget that would pull this info? https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/481794-friendly-number-format/#findComment-2992016 Thanks

Every year about this time, every webmaster and admin forum asks its members to share their New Year Resolutions for the next year. In over 15 years worth of admin forums, we haven't evolved this question. It's the same question, with often the same answers, every year. This year, I want to challenge community managers with a twist: what are your anti-goals and no goals? Anti Goals: the constraints that keep you aligned with your values No Goals: distractions or non-goals to keep you focused on what truly matters For example, say you’re striving to increase community engagement. Your goal might be to grow active participation by 10%, but your…

There's a nuance to this question. I didn't ask what do you plan to do differently for your community, I asked what do you - specifically, as an individual - plan to do differently in 2025? What skills do you want to learn? What efficiencies do you want to implement? What time do you want to allocate more thoughtfully? Running an independent community often means understanding ourselves the most. We are often the biggest reasons for our community's success, its potential failure, its sails to speed faster and its anchors to drag slower. How are we managing ourselves in the new year, before we manage our community?

This is a question about behavioral design. Imagine that you're a member of a popular forum that you enjoy, but it's been a few weeks or months since you last visited. When you come back, you're swamped with both catching up on topics that you previously followed. What do you do? Do you try to read through all of the threads? Do you read through some of the threads? Would you trust an AI summary? Scan through the posts marked as helpful?

For those of you who have an existing community and are ready to upgrade to Invision Community v5 once it becomes available, what are you communicating? Are you walking them through what features are being deprecated (like username sign-ons)? Are you showing them theme changes?

From Feverbee / Richard Millington One of my personal critiques about this Maslow-inspired hierarchy is that it presumes you must always build your community in layer by layer. Communities can actually focus on any one of those layers on its own merits, but your circle of impact will become much tighter and more focused.

Angela Jin, former Head of Programs & Contributor Experience at Automattic, reflects on her departure from Automattic and the WordPress community, expressing concern over the recent changes to the WordPress Code of Conduct, which she believes can be weaponized against community members. https://angelasjin.com/2024/10/21/on-community-code-of-conducts/

Hello Everyone, I am currently setting up my forum and looking for some well built IPS4 deployments that could serve as design and implementation inspiration. If you could kindly point me to some well done IPS4 communities, I would appreciate it a lot.

When we think about growing our online community, it’s easy to focus on individual contributions—like posts, likes, and badges. But what if we shifted our focus to building collective social memory instead? Collective social memory is the idea that a community's identity and strength come from shared experiences and knowledge, not just individual achievements. This means that instead of everyone seeking personal recognition, we create a space where the community remembers and grows together. Think of it like a group story, where everyone adds a chapter, and those chapters form the identity of the whole community. By focusing on collective memory, we can build a …

A story Have you ever noticed how sometimes less is more when it comes to communication? Edward Everett, once the greatest orator of his time, delivered a two-hour speech at Gettysburg in 1863. But it's Abraham Lincoln’s two-minute, 272-word Gettysburg Address that we all remember. This story highlights a key lesson: brevity matters. In building an online community, it's easy to think that more words or longer posts will make a greater impact. But in reality, carefully chosen, concise messages often resonate more deeply. How can we apply the lesson of brevity to our own forum and communications? Are there areas where we might be overwhelming our…

Are independent forums - out of all options on the modern web - are appropriate or even good for users new to community building or who don't have a group yet? I'm starting to think that forums are no longer starter projects, but fairly advanced in the group-building cycle once you have an established (or can tap in to an established) audience. You probably want to start with a blog or a resource site, and then add on forums once you've built up enough followers or users.

Imagine the following scenario: your child breaks her arm (ouch!), and a whole chain of events is set in motion. The parents need to immediately cancel their existing plans. The child must see a doctor. The doctor can do some important tests and prescriptions to remedy her. But there's a lot that the doctor cannot do. The only person who sees the whole job to be done - from beginning to end - is the parent. As community managers, we face similar challenges with our users. Our communities are set up to handle specific touchpoints with our members or customers, but we may not always see—or be able to influence—the entire journey they’re on. Here’s where the i…

I recently came across a really insightful comment by another user: Billions of dollars are spent on algorithms to grab user attentions. What does this mean for independent communities who don't have such deep pockets? We shouldn't fight for social discussion. We shouldn't fight for attention. We shouldn't fight for eyeballs and low-value participation. What we should fight for is to provide deep, expert value in our niches. We need to pivot to building "success communities" rather than "social communities" - where we gather best-in-class resources around our niche, whether it's user generated content or our own published content.

Quite a comprehensive article about online communities: Online Communities: Growing, Thriving in Digital Age - WORLD INSIDER 2024 (insider-wp.com)

Do you have a cache where you store your content ideas? One of the challenges for new and growing communities is coming up with fresh new content. An idea cache is a single spot where you aggregate all of your brainstorming, so you'll never run out of ideas. Some suggestions: - Create a single spot. This makes it easier to later reference. - Be inspired by others. There are so many smart people and creative ideas already out in the world, you dont have to think of everything on your own. Funnel those other people with newsletters, their sub stacks, and into one location to browse. (It's what I do for community management ideas for Invisioneer!)

If you're a new community (or you're looking to reinvent yourself as nee), one of the hardest things to do is to break past the incumbents. One approach is to become the Challenger Brand. Challenger brands don’t try to differentiate. They try to disrupt. They don’t compare themselves to the competition. They innovate and make their messaging all about their innovations, which, of course, becomes very relevant and differentiating to customers. Figure out the core of what your competitors do, and do it differently. Then center your messaging and value proposition around that difference.

What strategies do you think we can implement to improve how we communicate? Any particular tools or approaches you find effective?

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating article from The Washington Post titled "Pearls Before Breakfast." It’s about this intriguing experiment where Joshua Bell, one of the world's greatest violinists, played incognito in a DC Metro station during rush hour. Days before, he had filled the house at Boston's Symphony Hall, where seats were sold for $100. You’d think a world-class musician performing an intricate Bach piece on a $3.5 million Stradivarius would draw a huge crowd, right? Wrong. Hardly anyone stopped to listen. This experiment got me thinking about the age-old debate: context vs. content. In the world of online communities, we often emphasize the importa…

I was reflecting in the new Features Page / Our Picks page that IPS is refreshing for v5, and I realized that we actually had multiple ways to show our content: - displaying content by categorization (the traditional forum boards > subboards) - displaying content by chronology (Activity Streams) - displaying content by popularity (Leaderboard) - displaying content by manual selection (Featured / Our Picks page) IPS gives you 4 (!) different ways of displaying content. In contrast, social media gives you one method - a feed, which usually prioritizes engagement (likes, views, comments, shares, etc). One of the trending ideas, espoused by peo…