How to embed Clubs at the top of my Forums?

[Hunter Lyons]

I have a very complex website, and the main focus of my website is my sub-communities (which I am hoping to use Clubs for, as @bfarber suggested -- it seems like a perfect fit). 

However, my website is already very fragmented. I have a lot of different content areas (news, wiki, etc.) and I want the forums to be the focus.

Beyond the actual Clubs, I have tons of general discussion and off topic forums that I want used, too. So I wanted to combine Clubs + Forums.

I have been experimenting with just copying the Clubs Directory template into the Forums Index template, but it breaks and says no clubs can be found.

Does anyone have advice on how I can do this? I think with the Clubs at the top of my forums, the Forums pages (with Forums + Clubs) would be my community's naturally most active page.

Note my site has very little content right now, as I am still developing it and will release it to my organization in a few months. We have about 400 active members on our Discord, and we are an in-person collegiate gaming club, hoping to use Invision Community to augment our other communications platforms (social media, email newsletters, and Discord).

If you want to see what I mean, look at: https://www.argogaming.org/forums/ and https://www.argogaming.org/clubs/ and note how 1 club exists in /clubs/ but it does not populate on /forums/.

[Adriano Faria]

It might help:

 

[opentype]

There is a setting in the club settings to make club content show in their respective apps. This makes club forums visible under forums. 

It doesn’t really resolve the fragmentation issue though. One idea I would want to put out there is to only use clubs. You can use open clubs for your regular forums. People wouldn’t need to join those. 

[Hunter Lyons]

Very useful add on @Adriano Faria but I would really like to have the full Clubs interface. Click a club, view all its content areas, etc. -- and have that right above the normal Forums index.

@opentype I've put a lot of work into my forums, though (see below screenshot for an example) -- I'd really like to use both. Is there any way I could get them to work together? I know my way around messing with the templates very much so I was hoping to just insert the Clubs template above the Forums template.

Thanks a ton for y'all's feedback and advice, though -- I really appreciate it! Might fall back on using one of those two setups if I can't figure anything else out, but hopefully I can fully integrate the two apps.

[Adriano Faria]

3 minutes ago, Lyonharted said:

but I would really like to have the full Clubs interface.

 

[Hunter Lyons]

2 minutes ago, Adriano Faria said:

 

That is... EXACTLY what I wanted. Wonderful. Thanks so much. Your advice & plugins are outstanding.

[Joel R]

Hey @Lyonharted

Your site looks great, and you can tell that you're really paying attention to all the small details   

Something to consider from a community management perspective: since you're launching your community from scratch, I highly recommend you consolidate your news, wikis, clubs, and forums into as few critical channels as possible.  

Overbuilding the site is one of the biggest mistakes you can make early on.   

Based on my observation and confirmed by most admins, Discord users tend to stay in Discord and forum users tend to stay in forums. There's usually not a lot of cross-migration unless there is a compelling reason to use the forum.  What is that reason? 

Invision is not real time. Invision doesn't have game overlays. Invision doesn't capture game recordings.  Why do feel users need to use Invision then? 

Just make sure you have an actual community plan in place with your group that makes the community a core part of your gaming group.  

Joel

[Hunter Lyons]

Very helpful feedback. I'll likely consolidate our news into the forums and maybe some more. I've thought a lot about this, so I'll leave this here for anyone who might be in a similar situation:

I think we are in a special position to transition our members, and to use both Discord + Invision Community, simply because we got them on Discord in the first place. We're an in-person club -- we have monthly meetings with 50+ attendees, host dozens of events each week, etc. Most of our users adopted Discord when we asked. The transition should be easy, I think, as we'll plug it at meetings, and incentivize / reward activity. 

I'm not sure what this would like for communities whose membership is exclusively on Discord and sourced from Discord. I think there are a lot of ways that one could go about that, though. The one big possibility is to really gamify IC. Have giveaways on your forums; use Discord to cross-promote (post news on the forums, link it in a special channel); etc. Constantly promote and incentive both platforms. Over time, a healthy synergy can be found.

For us, we've wanted to use Invision Community, because it facilitates long-term discussion. For example, we used to have a #suggestions channel on Discord. Someone would post "we should add voice chats for League of Legends" or anything, really -- then other suggestions would start. People would chime in. There would be 8 conversations going on at once, and it was terribly confusing. From a staff perspective, parsing through that was tedious. With IC, we can segment these into threads in various forums, neatly organize it, and generally, we can more effectively stimulate conversation and action within our community.

Discord fills a certain kind of niche for us. We have different staff chats, like #executive-board, where we have conversation-style discussions. "Can you guys make it to a meeting on Sunday at 8 p.m.?" Whereas on our site, we can have more specific and long-term discussions. "Is it necessary to employ a Treasurer, or can the Secretary handle financial matters?' -- imagine that with 30 replies, discussed over a month long period, vs. a garble of messages in Discord that would quickly get buried as other conversations start.

I think that forums like Invision Community and chat platforms like Discord occupy very different niches, and clever community leaders can use both if they're careful about how. It's a lot easier to share memes over Discord, but if we want a system where our members can submit event proposals, staff can chime in, other members can offer feedback, etc. -- and so much more -- then IC is perfect. Hopefully we can pull off the transition and use both effectively.