Fan Clubs

I'm using the traditional format for my active community, but I'm using the fluid view for the forums of my in progress community at Fan Clubs. This is so I can showcase content from across the site and clubs while things are a bit sparse. Once there's enough growth and activity, I expect to switch to a more traditional forum structure, allowing members to switch to their preference.

I have one active community, which is a single niche community, but I'm also building two others. The main focus is an overly ambitious multi-niche site, but the other one that moving along pretty slowly will be a single niche site.

I love the approach. It's a very value-driven approach and I'm here for it!

This is a very well-written post. Congratulations on making this shift. You're doing it the right way and adding a ton of value in the process. I've been stuck with my tires spinning in the mud for the last few months, but you touched on some glaring weaknesses of mine that my current community and my new community can definitely benefit from. Thank you for sharing! This is something I'll be sure to visit from time-to-time.

That's an easy one - It has to be 10,000 members over the next 3 years. Give me the continuous growth. That, plus the bigger the number, the larger the pool of active members you'll get out of it. 10,000 members over 3 years averages 60+ members a week. That's not too shabby, and I bet there would be a lot more long-term success in that.

I've been there. Frankensteining things together is probably my biggest trait. I'm pretty much a modern-day Macgyver 😆. I remember the days of working in IPBWI to make this work very very well, but I'm very happy to have moved on from that. Finding the right options for me took some time to find what I liked best and configure it, but since then it's been very much set it and forget it since and was worth the upfront time investment. Long term, I'm hoping to get FanClubs.org to a place where it can be a primary source of income and I can have my own in-house dev for that kind of stuff. 🤔💭 One day....

For me, it's a no-brainer, but I don't think that's the case for everyone. WordPress will be easier for most people out of the box, so that might be a better solution for many, but the tight integration with the Community is important to me. I'm utilizing the sidebar in articles to showcase recent activity and clubs, I am able to craft a homepage that ties the whole site together, amongst other things. IPS has some room for improvement in terms of showcasing articles though. I wasn't a fan of the default layouts for articles so I purchased templates (plugins) to figure out how to give them the look you would expect from a publisher. I had to do the same to create custom blocks that would also showcase content professionally on the homepage. In the end, I'm very happy I made the switch. It required a bit of extra work to get the functionality and look out of it that I wanted, but it looks good now and has shown that ranking content won't be an issue, which was a concern of mine. I do think IPS does taxonomy better than WordPress as well.

Thanks @JoelR! I've used V3 long ago, but haven't been involved with being an admin of a community until one I was interested in became available about 4 years ago, which I instantly migrated to IPS. Definitely had some bumpiness at first, but the community is very happy with where things settled. My more ambitious project has been on IPS for a few years as well, despite the lack of activity. This spring I converted my WordPress site to pages, so I'm all in now.

I have two communities. One of them is an ambitious project that's very light on activity, so it'll be the perfect guinea pig to use in order to learn my way around the software before upgrading my more active community. @JoelR, great catches on the teaser video!