Nebthtet

Thanks everybody. If you have any questions on anything we’re doing Im happy to answer them. I’m also taking a lot of advice from more established community owners. If anybody else has any tips please share so we can all help each other out. 

Nice, I hope your community will keep on growing! 

Nice, I hope your community will keep on growing! 

Nice, I hope your community will keep on growing! 

Nice, I hope your community will keep on growing! 

Hold on! I have an amazing guide / topic to share in Community Administration board, just need a board moderator to approve the topic.  I think it'll give you some good ideas. 
Topic has been approved: 
 
 

Maybe another take on boundaries: what do you think of introducing achievements to community? For items created (posts, uploads to gallery, blogs, etc), things user does for the community (i.e. recruited someone, wrote an article).
Do you think such a way would be viable to boost engagement? Is only a badge reason enough to engage more?

Maybe another take on boundaries: what do you think of introducing achievements to community? For items created (posts, uploads to gallery, blogs, etc), things user does for the community (i.e. recruited someone, wrote an article).
Do you think such a way would be viable to boost engagement? Is only a badge reason enough to engage more?

You need to be careful with the height of the boundary, though. While jumping it might be satisfying and rewarding for the member that will feel accepted, at the same time failing to jump it might leave a lot of potential useful members out. An example from my real life experience:
I have joined my first forum waaay back in 2001. Back then it was the most popular discussion option in a very specific niche - Formula 1 racing. We had real life meetings and parties, we had many internal jokes incomprehensible for outsiders, we developed strong relationships that last until today. However, entering our club wasn't easy - we really knew our stuff so newbies with basic questions or not well very well presented arguments were often ridiculed - not directly, sometimes with a joke only we can understand, but in the end it created a bit of a hostile, unwelcoming atmosphere for newbies. 
As it is natural through the years many of the regular members dropped out due to losing interest or other issues and there were no fresh members to replace them, because of the stuff explained in previous paragraph. So eventually the size of the community thinned out and it died. Now, 18 years later, I have met one of my best friends in this forum, including my life partner, however what is left of it is a facebook messenger chat with 5 people. The forum is still online, but this is its most recent posts list:

So, yes, keeping the entry boundary high will result in a long term lasting friendships and really dedicated members. The higher the boundary, the tighter the friendships. However it will also be the most probable certain death of the community - sooner or later people within the borders will leave and the newer ones won't be able to jump high enough. 
So, it is an extremely delicate balance. I would argue it is probably the most important detail you need to figure out - how hard you want it to be for new members. Do you want to have facebook and twitter login available that will attract a lot of members, but many of them will post thin questions and the percentage of well defined meaningful discussions will drop. Or you want a steeper entry curve, which might lead to have very few really meaningful discussions, but you will eventually lose critical mass and the community will die. Unfortunately you can't have both. 
To find this balance you need to adhere to your mission statement. On my current forum, I am removing posts that are hostile towards newbies, even though some of them might be fair - a newbie asks a question that has been answered thousand of times, or a newbie asks 5 questions without contributing answers to other peoples questions, etc. This alienates the elders, some of them even might scream "censorship!" and leave, which will be a big overall loss to the community as most of them have invaluable knowledge. However, this is the path I have chosen and I am adhering to it. 
My niche is travel and I have decided that this is the mission statement of my forum - I want to make self organized travel more popular and reduce the monopoly of travel agencies that shoehorn all people in the same boiler plate travel programs and charge pretty penny for their easily replaceable services on top of that. This means that very often there are newbies that take their first self organized flight and will always ask question about cabin bags size or liquid limits. This definitely dilutes the the discussions, imagine that such basic topics are always popping up on latest list, instead a story from a long self-organized trip from a little known country like Uzbekistan. However, for me I have decided that I want to be newbie friendly instead of elitist. I want to have 10 people that will make their first self-organized trip to Rome (Rome is very easy to organize when you are in Europe - tons of cheap flights, concentrated and easy accessible main attractions, etc.), instead of 2 people that will discuss their Nepal trecks. In the long term, the Nepal guys are the ones that will contribute very unique and quality content to my community, but it doesn't help with the Rome guys who will book with travel agency if they can't find a place that will provide friendly answers to their basic questions. I do want to have it both, really, but it is hard and next to impossible to achieve.
I do hope to realize a gamification idea I have, which will reward the quality and unique discussions more, I hope it will help. I am in the process of defining the project requirements and will post it here if we can community fund it. We'll see. 
Very interesting topic. 

I always see it as a literal “evolutionary” process. I constantly try out new “mutations”, i.e. features. If they turn out to be beneficial, I might put more work into them and make them more prominent. If they do not work, I scale them back slowly (e.g. by first demoting them in the menus) and remove them eventually. There certainly is a danger in adding too much stuff. Not just in regards to the software conflicts you will get, but also in the way you confuse your users. I even have tons of “display:none” declarations in my theme to hide stock functionality. Often less is more. 

I think a lot of us overdose on the Marketplace (looking at you @SJ77!!) And I'm guilty if this too (sorry Tier 1 support!!) but I do believe that as long as you have a significant reason for the Marketplace app or plugin then you'll be fine.  
Its one thing to install something like a Member of the Month app where it's a central component of your community activity, versus an app that you think will magically run itself.  And that's where I think a lot of us get into trouble with the big apps or plugins, where we don't invest the time or energy or strategy to make it a central focus.  
Great point.  This goes to the new article by @Matt on Primark Cafe where they're creating new experiences.  
You see this with malls in the United States, where instead of the same boring department stores they're inviting more "pop up" stores for unique and changing experiences.  
From my own life, I just spent the weekend shopping at Ikea.  I don't furniture shop at all, but my friend dragged me to the store - and whoa!  For anybody who does not know about Ikea's furniture stores, it's not a store -- it's an experience.  You're eating Swedish meatballs, the kids are in the play area, you're on their walking tour of Swedish ingenuity, you're surrounded by these amazing full room installations of new cabinets and lighting and pillows and furniture that are perfectly curated, and by the end of the day, your life goal is to sell your home, move to Sweden, and rent an 800 square foot economy space just so you can redecorate a multi purpose living / kitchen / bedroom and install one of their crazy lighting fixtures and your life really won't be complete until you do so.  
You still need to offer functional value to your members as a fundamental reason to visit your community.  But layered on top of that functional value is how you want to deliver, present, and delight your users.  Whether that's Instagram-ready visuals, a compelling tour through your site, or Swedish meatballs 🤣, that's the hard part of creating a unique community experience.  

Facts!!
Thank you for this Joel.
 
One of our "Rookie Mistakes" back in 2017 was that we tried to have every single app and plugin that the marketplace offered, then try to "cram" it all into One place, not creating "doors" that led into other places to find "More"
Also we were changing Themes way to much and too often
 
Now, we have staff meetings every week, we have each staff member familiar with IPS and it's Powerful Core Features, then they are always going thru the marketplace to research key apps and plugins to make sure they are needed, not needed, and pro's vs con's of having them

Overall the site is very pleasant and clean-looking, no clutter. And beautiful dog pics positively stand out :)

Brilliant, really, really chuffed that you reached out to Yoast on this, experts in their field. Would love to see more examples of this.
I've always thought that Invision Community could do with an equivalent Yoast SEO and W3 Total Cache performance add-on to make life easier and assist with content authoring of news and blog articles. 
I get chills thinking about IPS reaching out to Elegant Themes to bring Divi Builder to Pages! 

Overall the site is very pleasant and clean-looking, no clutter. And beautiful dog pics positively stand out :)

Overall the site is very pleasant and clean-looking, no clutter. And beautiful dog pics positively stand out :)

Overall the site is very pleasant and clean-looking, no clutter. And beautiful dog pics positively stand out :)

Forums already existed in ancient Rome (as central places where people would get together to talk and do business). If it survived for 2000 years, it probably also can go on for a while. 😉
My choice of terms would depend on the circumstances. Community is fine too, but it also rather generic. A Facebook group can also be a community. Forums describes a specific functionality. Yes, it has certain connotations (like “old-school”), but not only bad ones. And it doesn’t have the bad connotations social media platforms currently get. 

You can set the size of the thumbnail already. I always raise it. The default is way too small.
what is needed is a regenration feature after making changes to the settings.

This is really good news, I'd been hoping to see a performance-based release for some time as traditionally IPS does rate low in Page SpeedGTMetrix/Yslow tests and we've been waiting for some of these overdue improvements for quite some time. So huge thanks! 
Lazyloading should really help with Gallery in particular, I currently get a poor Pagespeed score of F42 on one of my sites.
Please consider adding to your to do list (if not already added):
Serve scaled images (current GTMetrix reports a score of F0 with a 1.2MiB 80% possible saving is possible on my Gallery index page) Where static content is uploaded to Amazon S3 and Cloudfront (it should be copied, not moved!), often there is missing header metadata such as cache-control, expires etc. Whilst investigating poor Cloudfront cache hit ratios of just 5%, I noticed this week an IPS uploaded .png image placed in my S3 bucket with a content-type of image/jpeg instead of image/png.  Leverage Browser Caching (you can't do anything about Amazon and Google external resources, but IPS could and should add more to improve caching of its static resources) Specify Image Dimensions - I get awful scores for this both on Gallery and Forums where images are missing width and height attributes. This happens particularly in grid view layout and where you upload an image attachment into forum description fields via AdminCP.  Remove query strings from urls - Have raised this several times, and keep getting told it's needed to allow cache busting, but the string token could be built into the actual filename/url itself. If CSS for example is later rebuilt, a new url is created and immediately browsers see the updated resource and recache it. All of the separate CSS and JS files should be grouped into one or two files, not like 10-12. Pages article images should have medium sized thumbnails available instead of just tiny thumbnails which look awful stretch to cover on 4K displays. The alternative is full-sized (in my case massive 1920x1080 images) which kill page loading times are are such overkill for article listing previews.  
 
 
 

I feel like

about GIFs, because my users are

You can do this since 3.X (at least) actually. In 4.X this option is hidden under "Insert other media" button.

With all due respect, but if you guys told us that you would be introducing a media manager where we could reuse images for articles etc, then I would be inclined to get a bit more excited.
God knows how much server space I have wasted uploading the same images over and over again, when I could have uploaded it once and reused it over and over again.

@Matt
I was typing the other day and I made a mistake, I pressed : and typed two letters, then my post field/box was invaded with emojis. I thought it was a cool feature but I have struggled to trigger it since, I know how too now and I have seen the "shortcut" feature on the ACP.

However, I am certain there are things we can learn about the front end that people might not be aware of.

A future idea for this section?

We have an amazing trophy app in the marketplace ?