Sonya*

I am in love with the fluid view. What I dislike about it:
The button Start new topic on the front page wants me to select one from one. 😞 To encourage guests to submit I do allow only one forum for them to post topics/questions. Do not overwhelm the user with the large lists of categories, forums and sub-forums where they are not allowed to post in.

You speak of SEO to reduce clicks, what about user-friendly reduction of clicks? 😉 
The second wish: to encourage registrations, I would like to see the topics from the forums set to Users without read permission can open forum? in the fluid list. This way I can promote a forum, where registered users only can read. The guests can see a topic teaser in fluid view. When they click on the topic, they see Custom No Permission Error. If they would like to read and participate, they have to register. 
Currently, those forums are just not visible in the fluid view. 😞 Hence, the guests do not even know the forum exists.

Things can change, but looking at our 'things to blog' queue, there are 2 cloud only features (talked about here before) and 3 all platform features (two not talked about at all but one of them is a very popular request). We also have a fairly big thing in the pipeline that is all platform.

Guys, the irony is the amount of replies this blog has had has kept it trending for days.

There is a feature in 4.7:
 

I am in love with the fluid view. What I dislike about it:
The button Start new topic on the front page wants me to select one from one. 😞 To encourage guests to submit I do allow only one forum for them to post topics/questions. Do not overwhelm the user with the large lists of categories, forums and sub-forums where they are not allowed to post in.

You speak of SEO to reduce clicks, what about user-friendly reduction of clicks? 😉 
The second wish: to encourage registrations, I would like to see the topics from the forums set to Users without read permission can open forum? in the fluid list. This way I can promote a forum, where registered users only can read. The guests can see a topic teaser in fluid view. When they click on the topic, they see Custom No Permission Error. If they would like to read and participate, they have to register. 
Currently, those forums are just not visible in the fluid view. 😞 Hence, the guests do not even know the forum exists.

Good news: it already works for categories. 😀
Good ideas, I'll make a note.
Maaaaaybe.

I am in love with the fluid view. What I dislike about it:
The button Start new topic on the front page wants me to select one from one. 😞 To encourage guests to submit I do allow only one forum for them to post topics/questions. Do not overwhelm the user with the large lists of categories, forums and sub-forums where they are not allowed to post in.

You speak of SEO to reduce clicks, what about user-friendly reduction of clicks? 😉 
The second wish: to encourage registrations, I would like to see the topics from the forums set to Users without read permission can open forum? in the fluid list. This way I can promote a forum, where registered users only can read. The guests can see a topic teaser in fluid view. When they click on the topic, they see Custom No Permission Error. If they would like to read and participate, they have to register. 
Currently, those forums are just not visible in the fluid view. 😞 Hence, the guests do not even know the forum exists.

There's no built in way, but you can use the Zapier filters for this
https://zapier.com/help/create/customize/add-conditions-to-zaps-with-filters

I combined my thoughts on this into an article. Maybe it can be helpful to some:
Does it still make sense to start a new forum or community in the 2020s?

@Matt 
Any discounts ? I need an additional license !

We have helped dozens of new and existing communities in the past few years. Not to mention all the hundreds or thousands who use us but don't work with us directly.
You need to offer value to users, and you need to market the community to present that value to them. Social media has a leg up on the second one because the users are already there, but there is no reason why an independent site (whether it's a 'forum based community' as you put it, or any other kind of community) cannot also be successful. There are many thousands of successful sites out there, so if a site doesn't succeed it cannot really be blamed on the tech giants. Either you didn't offer enough value, or you were unable to get it seen by the right people.
It's a bit weird to measure your success in terms of number of members vs. Facebook. Measure your success in something more meaningful to your site. Is it providing value to people, is it covering its own costs, is it growing? A small community site with 100 people can absolutely be counted as a success if it has achieved its goals.

Replace community with blog, e-shop, news magazine, portal, Facebook group, Instagram account etc. It does not make sense to start anything new, knowing that success is only the exception and not the rule.
And I'm out as well 😄 

Thanks for weighing in! From my own personal experience, social media can be a super powerful tool to convert guests to members. I do think it depends on the niche, but I see on a daily basis how a community leader can make social media work for your community. 
In my own community, guests can view a few topics per day before being asked to register. They tend to register because they find the topics valuable. They also spark an emotion. Therefore, registrations continue to climb! A lot of these people found my community because of the shares on social media. 🤓 

@Davyc this is only partially true, what you say. 
I am often asked how to compete with social media. This is a wrong question.
The wrong question: how to compete with social media and try them to do in my community the same they can do on social media?
The correct question: how to exploit social media to promote something in my community they would not or cannot do on social media?
Some suggestions:
they want to discuss something that require them to be anonymous. Like medical issues, NSFW, games... There are many topics, that people do not like to associate with their real names. These are still perfect niches for the communities.  they need extended support from experts including knowledge base, tutorials, guides, docs. they would like to share something where they can control the access for (e.g. paid files, videos, music) they look for access to exclusive content through membership site (courses, coaching etc.) they need a place, where they can collect things (links, offers, companies, reviews, events) and can contribute to the data they eager to promote themselves or their products and services by contributing to your community (showcases, interviews, use cases) they look for competitions, raffles, quizzes,  crowdfunding, voting - just to name some apps from Marketplace ... (add here your unique point) All these points above are not covered (or only poor) on social media. These are the added values that make the communities still strong. Even start-ups. Even from zero. This is where the journey goes in my humble opinion. 

Here's a question. If SM is apparently so dominant, why are there 8.9 billion google searches made every single day (63% of those on mobile)? That's a lot of people searching for a lot of things which apparently they aren't finding on social media. 

@Davyc this is only partially true, what you say. 
I am often asked how to compete with social media. This is a wrong question.
The wrong question: how to compete with social media and try them to do in my community the same they can do on social media?
The correct question: how to exploit social media to promote something in my community they would not or cannot do on social media?
Some suggestions:
they want to discuss something that require them to be anonymous. Like medical issues, NSFW, games... There are many topics, that people do not like to associate with their real names. These are still perfect niches for the communities.  they need extended support from experts including knowledge base, tutorials, guides, docs. they would like to share something where they can control the access for (e.g. paid files, videos, music) they look for access to exclusive content through membership site (courses, coaching etc.) they need a place, where they can collect things (links, offers, companies, reviews, events) and can contribute to the data they eager to promote themselves or their products and services by contributing to your community (showcases, interviews, use cases) they look for competitions, raffles, quizzes,  crowdfunding, voting - just to name some apps from Marketplace ... (add here your unique point) All these points above are not covered (or only poor) on social media. These are the added values that make the communities still strong. Even start-ups. Even from zero. This is where the journey goes in my humble opinion. 

Regarding their advertising, maybe. But it is actually not really reflected in the product itself. The apps and the features are still very much rooted in the traditional niche/hobby forum world and continue to work well there. There is some advanced stuff for something like a corporate support community, but most of the features are still typical for niche communities, like a forum for a car brand with user galleries, clubs, discussions to maintain the specific models and so on. It can still work well, but starting fresh now will mean a significant investment. Real-world example: My youngest community project started in 2016 with social media and apps already well established. (In fact, I created it specifically because I was so annoyed by people in that niche using Facebook groups.) Building the community website took 4 years until I even started to monetize it. Now it has over 100,000 members and pays for itself. (The secret was what I said in my first post: I added something to the website that users in my niche needed so much that they would register to get it. All other tips – as mentioned in the original blog post – are correct and useful too, but that one thing was 90% of the success.)

 
I argued before that the distinction between forums and social media is misleading, as it is about scale not type of website:
https://invisioncommunity.com/forums/topic/447615-the-future-of-forums-lets-talk/?do=findComment&comment=2856772
Pointing to the “king” is kind of irrelevant to me, just as the indie hard rock band doesn’t point to Justin Bieber album sales. If the band is happy and their audience is happy, the big players don’t matter. Niche communties are small(er) by definition. Nothing wrong with that. Chances are, the most active members of our communities stay loyal to us for years to come while they might have already deleted their Facebook account. 😉 

@Davyc this is only partially true, what you say. 
I am often asked how to compete with social media. This is a wrong question.
The wrong question: how to compete with social media and try them to do in my community the same they can do on social media?
The correct question: how to exploit social media to promote something in my community they would not or cannot do on social media?
Some suggestions:
they want to discuss something that require them to be anonymous. Like medical issues, NSFW, games... There are many topics, that people do not like to associate with their real names. These are still perfect niches for the communities.  they need extended support from experts including knowledge base, tutorials, guides, docs. they would like to share something where they can control the access for (e.g. paid files, videos, music) they look for access to exclusive content through membership site (courses, coaching etc.) they need a place, where they can collect things (links, offers, companies, reviews, events) and can contribute to the data they eager to promote themselves or their products and services by contributing to your community (showcases, interviews, use cases) they look for competitions, raffles, quizzes,  crowdfunding, voting - just to name some apps from Marketplace ... (add here your unique point) All these points above are not covered (or only poor) on social media. These are the added values that make the communities still strong. Even start-ups. Even from zero. This is where the journey goes in my humble opinion. 

2009 I was looking for a software that offers everything out of the box. My largest project had been a knotted thing from:
phpBB for forums CMS Made Simple for editorial content and custom modules Coppermine Photo Gallery AJAX chat OpenX Life... (I cannot even remember the name of software for users' blogs) I have connected all logins myself, customized all themes to get them looking similar. And... it was a nightmare to maintain

It took us almost half a year to convert the whole thing to IPS. And after relaunch... well, my vacation feeling had started:

I am happy I have decided for Invision Community. The other option I had was dolphin community. 😄 

2009 I was looking for a software that offers everything out of the box. My largest project had been a knotted thing from:
phpBB for forums CMS Made Simple for editorial content and custom modules Coppermine Photo Gallery AJAX chat OpenX Life... (I cannot even remember the name of software for users' blogs) I have connected all logins myself, customized all themes to get them looking similar. And... it was a nightmare to maintain

It took us almost half a year to convert the whole thing to IPS. And after relaunch... well, my vacation feeling had started:

I am happy I have decided for Invision Community. The other option I had was dolphin community. 😄