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I posted this idea in another topic, but it seems appropriate to bring it up here as a (hopefully) possible addition to v5.

My community is Forum-centric, having begun over 25 years ago as a discussion forum and slowly evolving as software capabilities have grown. Despite the new capabilities, many members continue to use the discussion Forum feature to emulate those other capabilities, especially the Blogs. The Blog feature is very robust and is much better for blogs than pseudo-discussions. However, despite the advantages they offer to members, Blogs are woefully underutilized within my community. Blog users within the community have been discussing this disparity and the key recommendation we’ve come up with for increasing Blog visibility (and hopefully usage) is improving visibility of Blogs within the Forums. Ideally, we would like the publication of a blog entry to create an announcement topic similar to those created for the Articles feature. The solution we envision is that the blog entry author would make two selections as part of the blog entry creation process:

  1. Create a blog entry announcement topic (Y/N)

If the above is selected…

2a. Create a new topic (blog entry author chooses the forum/sub-forum in which the announcement topic appears), or

2b. Add the announcement to an existing topic (from a dropdown list of announcement topics associated with their blog)

Comment replies posted in either location (Forums and Blogs) would appear in both locations, just as the current Articles announcement discussions work.

Our current workaround for this is to encourage members to create discussion topics that mirror their Blog entries, or which provide teasers of their blog content and link to the entries so that other members of the community might check the blogs. This requires additional work on the part of Blog authors, however, and most choose not to do that.

Another option we’ve considered (but not really explored) is changing our landing page to give Blogs more prominence, possibly putting them on an equal footing with the Forums. This would be a significant paradigm shift for my community, however, and the majority of members would complain about the additional “work” [of clicking one more time to get to the Forums].

The multi app suite of Invision Community is one of its greatest strengths - and also one of its greatest weaknesses. The apps are siloed.

Some food for thought while your feedback is pending:

  1. In a forum centric community, you're going to have to push the other apps to give them a greater standing. This means prioritizing their content, their links, and their positioning across your entire community layout such as your menus, your promotion and featuring of content. Users will always go to the easiest and most familiar option (the forums), unless you intentionally surface the apps you want to prioritize.

  2. Some quick wins that you can implement is to slap on Blog widgets across your forum index and topics, your activity streams, your newsletters and bulk mail.

This is a real issue in my primary community which is fairly high volume.

Edited by Joel R

The approach of announcing content from other apps in the forum is a feature available for Pages. And it’s a huge mess. We probably shouldn’t extend that functionality. (I would actually suggest to remove it, as people turn it on in good faith and then have issues with it for years to come.)

Global content discovery was solved in the 4.x product line with the Discovery feeds. Here, everything appears, no matter what app it was posted in. So, the better solution is to make the feed page a prominent entry point for the members. Blog posts, new galleries, new topics, new replies, it all appears nicely in one feed.

Edited by opentype

  • Author

I'm curious about the announcement feature for Pages being "a huge mess." My community has just started using Pages (we call it "Articles") and, though we have very limited experience with it, it has been very helpful. Communities with considerably more Pages experience might have different experiences, however, so I'm interested.

Your feed page suggestion is very interesting. One of the alternatives that we've been looking it is changing our landing page.

Yes, pushing apps, especially things like Blogs and Pages, is on our radar. I'll look into your suggestions and seeing how we might implement them.

Thanks for the feedback!

16 hours ago, opentype said:

Global content discovery was solved in the 4.x product line with the Discovery feeds

Partially solved.

The Activity Streams are great at the point of initiation, it displays all of the content from across the community. But once you go to the app, you're stuck in the silo of the app - there are no widgets of global Activity Streams to seamless navigate you to other parts of the community.

One of the other drawbacks - and this is a powerful anecdotal observation - is that the Activity Stream treats all content the same: every content posted in chronological order. But content creation in the apps is not the same. One blog may be thoughtfully curated with one hour of editing and writing, but it can be quickly buried in the Activity Stream brhind a hundred forum posts.

Edited by Joel R

21 hours ago, Brother Tyler said:

Yes, pushing apps, especially things like Blogs and Pages, is on our radar.

For background context, I have the same issue as you - we have an incredible Blogs section - but it's overshadowed by the Forums.

One last item to consider is that you need a sufficient threshold of activity and compelling content on Blogs to make it a draw to begin with. You can't just offer an app, with a blank slate, and hope that people will come even when Blogs is a superior app for long form content. In my case, I launched and relaunched and relaunched Blogs three times in my community over 7 years. The first two times, my users never picked it up even though it was a better format for what they wanted to share. The third time, I worked with a group of 5 super posters to privately build 2 weeks worth of content, and then heavily promoted it. It was a very actively managed launch.

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