Joel R

Send a message to Lindy or Matt.  I'm sure they'll consider you.  

Send a message to Lindy or Matt.  I'm sure they'll consider you.  

I may or may not have applied 🙃

1. I agree with @Abies to make this board-specific.  
2. Will you turn this on in your own community? Asking for a friend.  And every IPS client who has ever posted in the feedback forum.  
3. Parity of apps - will we see this badge on other apps? 

1. I agree with @Abies to make this board-specific.  
2. Will you turn this on in your own community? Asking for a friend.  And every IPS client who has ever posted in the feedback forum.  
3. Parity of apps - will we see this badge on other apps? 

1. I agree with @Abies to make this board-specific.  
2. Will you turn this on in your own community? Asking for a friend.  And every IPS client who has ever posted in the feedback forum.  
3. Parity of apps - will we see this badge on other apps? 

1. I agree with @Abies to make this board-specific.  
2. Will you turn this on in your own community? Asking for a friend.  And every IPS client who has ever posted in the feedback forum.  
3. Parity of apps - will we see this badge on other apps? 

1. For the User Profile enhancements, this new type of Answer prestige can be better integrated into the rest of the suite.  In particular, on postbits and hovercards.   
2. For the ACP Statistics, these statistics are tied to changeable timeframes?  For example: Last Week, Last Month, Custom Timeframe, etc.  

1. For the User Profile enhancements, this new type of Answer prestige can be better integrated into the rest of the suite.  In particular, on postbits and hovercards.   
2. For the ACP Statistics, these statistics are tied to changeable timeframes?  For example: Last Week, Last Month, Custom Timeframe, etc.  

Can this be enabled as a per club setting? 
Can a content item be turned into an anonymous item? 
Do posters of anonymous topic stay anonymous when replying? I can see some accidents happening if users are not careful.  
 

Please do not make it so that when the feature is disabled users see any wording, strings, graphics, etc. that give them any indication that anonymous posting is a possibility. I can see where some admins may want the feature but for those that do not it should be completely disabled from view when disabled in the ACP
 

Well, I'd like to give you the converse and share MY fear: like most admins and community managers, I'm already limited in time to managing my own community, much less trying to manage the dozen other other social media properties.  I wish I had the luxury to handpick, curate, and write cute teasers on every single item to promote, but the reality is that I won't have time.  So anything you can do to automate and expedite the promotion (eg. auto-promote articles, promote directly from activity stream) will help time-pressed admins fulfill their promotions in the most efficient manner while still allowing them the ability to curate the items as needed.  
Also, I'd like to point out that it's not IPS' responsibility to ensure people post interesting things.  You can never really fully address that burden of responsibility.  (Unless your SEO classes are followed by creative writing classes?? )
 

1.  We can promote any content including those where guests don't have permissions, correct?  
2.  Photo of the block?  Both main content area and sidebar.
3.  I second the suggestion by @Real Hal9000 but with a more detailed suggestion: a setting in a category to automatically turn ON promotions for all new content.  (The author of the content item can still manually disable the promotion; and admins can still delete the promotion from the ACP.  All this does is automatically queue the promotions).  This automates the process even more for busy community managers like @Charles.  Keepin' it real for you Charles.
4.  Is Matt our new SEO Guru?? I can see him doing bicep curls as he draws nonsensical SEO diagrams:

Teach us this Matt.  
5.  "Our Picks" index page - any way to remove the titles and subtitle?  This can be a very compelling and dynamic homepage a la Pinterest once you add some blocks.   
6.  Safe to assume that content items on Our Picks index will follow permissions?  For example, members-only content items won't show to visitors?  
7.  Suggestion: allow Community Moderators / Admins to promote directly from the Activity Stream.  This will help speed up the promotion process 
8.  Suggestion: When re-promoting content (thank you Rikki for confirming), I think it would be beneficial to keep a history of prior promotions.  
9.  How many content items do we show on Our Picks index?  When do they fall off?  

It's important to "really" know your audience.  Many people tasked with communicating to a wide audience assume readers have sufficient "real world" experience and college-level reading ability (In the language being used) in which to be able to "really" understand the message that is trying to be conveyed.  
There was a time people actually had a love of words, think back to the time of Shakespeare.  Now it seems people take a certain pride in trying to communicate with others with the fewest characters (not words) they can.  This is causing people to have shorter and shorter attention spans.  
"Executive Summaries" are a great way of providing a simplified explanation of a topic and cater to those folks with short attention spans. 
If you choose to use abbreviations or words not commonly used it is helpful to provide an explanation of their meaning.  
Lastly, writers often focus their attentions on details (or choosing just the right words) and completely forget to call the readers to some kind of action.  Some folks have more time than money, while others have money but little free time.  Most any call to action can readily utilize both so don't focus all of your attention on one group.  Give your readers a multitude of ways to be of service in the short and long term.  
 
 
 
 
 

To give some background information on this topic, I'm a really big advocate in transforming IPS from a support community into a knowledge community with best practices and thought leadership for community management. And that's why I love the topic of Activity Streams, because it combines both strategy and product knowledge.  
I'd love to hear examples of how you've customized or tweaked the Activity Streams to fit your community.

@Stuart Silvester was wearing a black turtleneck while typing this blog post.  True story.  😁

@Stuart Silvester was wearing a black turtleneck while typing this blog post.  True story.  😁

@Stuart Silvester was wearing a black turtleneck while typing this blog post.  True story.  😁

Good eyes!  

Agree. I come across lot of "communities" with a long list of empty subforums and no topics in most of them. Nothing unique. Activity stream reveals the "community's" health. Dead before born.

I make the most time C providing content that is worth to discuss 😉 
then follows P (joining other communites related to mine and being active there, but true active not only because...) 
and then sometimes I (I have some contacts that seems to be useful, but most of them only seem 😄 )
H is nothing for me. 

OOP! Ok awesome 😆

I think Language (and the language strings) are one of the easiest, fastest, yet most powerful ways for you to cultivate a unique culture for your community.  It's also using a default feature of IPS so you're not customizing with a third party app.  I used to think that langstrings were only for non-english communities but they should be used by any admin to cultivate a unique culture and lingo for your board.  
If you have a themed community, you can be extremely creative in your language customization.  Even if you don't have a themed community, it's an opportunity to think very deeply about your organization's goals and to couch those goals within a set of unique terms.  For example:
- if I were running a Harry Potter website, my reactions could be 'spells'
- if I were running a gaming clan, my leaderboard could be a 'scoreboard' or 'hit list'
- if I were running a mental health nonprofit, my clubs could be called 'support circles'. 
As a personal example, I changed my langstring for Subscription to Pledge.  Subscription sounded very commercial and monetary.  I wanted a word that connected better with supporting my websites mission and values, and to have less of $$ edge.  

Is this blog post the definitive guide to gamification? No.  But I think it's a decent start of a conceptual introduction, and more importantly, a conceptual framework to think deeply and broadly about gamification.  
For example, here are things that can be easily extended for gamification:
- Ranks and Pips: old school gamification badges that have been around forever.  If you're not using a third party trophy system, then you should at least be using Ranks.  
- Language: most of us are probably using the default language for things like reactions, leaderboard, and reputation.  The default language is not geared towards  personally engaging or congratulating the user, so you can change the language strings.  
- Recognition topics: this is something that needs to be manually done and many boards already do this, but a board for public recognition of major accomplishments and group promotions.  Think of it as going up on stage to get an award from the organization's president.  
Gamification is the defining user engagement framework of our time and that's because gamification techniques are behaviorally-based.  The first website to get into your mind is the website who wins your attention, and thus your time, clicks, and money.  I think this blog post is a good springboard to think profoundly about all the aspects of gamification and the application of the idea to our specific communities.  Do I think IPS can and ought to do much more in the core software? Hell yes.  But in the meantime, there are plenty of things to think about, experiment with, and implement.  

Probably the most important concept of the year for admins to think over.
More dopamine-fueled addiction from IPS please.  

That is a tragedy and no one can even begin to know how that affects you - condolences to you, your community and their family and friends.  There are no words, but thoughts and prayers are with you.