Forums

The engagement trap is a race to community activity for the sake of activity. It's usually measured by simple aggregate numbers like the total number of posts, topics, likes, or members.

Many community managers and webmasters enjoy spouting engagement numbers. It's an easy number to brag about. It's an easy number to find. It's also, unfortunately, a terrible metric to measure.

Once you have built your community and watched it spring into life, it's easy to think that you have done all you need to do.

However, there are three simple things that you're probably not doing that is curbing your potential growth.

Joel is back with another snack size blog where he flexes his community building and emoji selecting muscles to bring you 4 simple ideas that can be digested in less than four minutes.

Think about all the different touchpoints where you try to connect with members: forum discussions, blog comments, personal messages, email newsletters, weekly meetings, and perhaps offline events. You write witty and clever messages. You dedicate an entire section of your community to welcome and hello topics. You spend enormous amounts of time trying to elicit engagement from members.

What if I told you that there’s one touchpoint that you consistently overlook where members reach out to you, some for the very first time?

Security should never be an afterthought. Don't wait until an attack has compromised your site before you review your community's security.

All too often, site owners consider increasing their security only when it's too late, and their community has already been compromised.

Taking some time now to check and improve the security of your community and server will pay dividends.

In this blog, we run down 8 ways that you can protect your community with Invision Community. We go through the security features you may not know about to best practices all communities should be following.

Are you looking to launch a new online community or revitalize an existing community, and you're worried about the numbers of users?

Gaining members - and retaining them - is always the hardest struggle for new communities.

Joel explains how to build an audience with CHIP.