Joel R

As a follow-up to this article, I wanted to say that I fully recognize the supreme irony of posting this article in the middle of the feature blast for 4.5 -- we're being inundated with new features every week: blog categories! club statistics! search insights! stock photos! security stuff! mobile mobile mobile!!  But this is meant to be a timely reminder in the middle of all of these feature releases that these new features and settings are simply the starting point for your community.  You should think carefully and thoughtfully in crafting these features to your community's mission. How do they align with your community's purpose?  How do they enhance / improve what you're trying to accomplish?  Are the features necessary, nice-to-have, or irrelevant?  When do the options stop becoming choices, and start becoming distractions?  
These are examples of real things I've seen during my community reviews:
20+ reactions: Users literally can't even select some of the reactions, because the list goes off the page.  You don't need a reaction for every single human expression, agreement, not-so-agreement, totally-not-agree-but-haha-agree. You just need enough to capture simple expressions.     20+ empty boards: This usually occurs when the ambition of the admin exceeds the subject expertise.  You don't need a board for every possible discussion, subject, or international language -- what value do they offer if they're empty? If you feel you absolutely must offer these boards, then offer them as sub-boards where you still have room to grow but it doesn't overwhelm the forum index. 10+ subscriptions: Humans don't need or want to make complex purchasing decisions, especially over something like a forum membership.  People want choice, but not overwhelming amounts of choice.          The communities who focus on their core objectives and offer best-in-class resources will be the ones who will continue to thrive as the web becomes more crowded (and with more choices!).  It usually means slimming down and focusing all of your energies to be the best in what you do.  The Paradox of Choice leads to analysis paralysis, to purchase paralysis, and to less satisfaction among your members.

Will this allow the member to use the same password as they had before? Kind of defeats the purpose if they can.

Wow, you have a very similar story.  Switched from SMF in 2013! 
Welcome to the community.  🎉

Wow, you have a very similar story.  Switched from SMF in 2013! 
Welcome to the community.  🎉

Happy New Year!! 🤗

Congrats @Ehren H on the new theme for the ACP!  Can't wait until they let you loose on the front-end!  🙂  

Vampire
But the sparkly cool ones, like from Twilight.  

Invision Power Services: Making ACP warp speed look blindingly good. Or something.  
@Matt promised me that he had enough vegemite to feed the team to do a couple more updates in 4.5.      
Also, I recommend that you be promoted to our sound mixer for releases.  Your "BUM BUM BUM!!!" was on point.  Most people will be blind by then due to the ACP, but at least we can listen to you.

Vampire
But the sparkly cool ones, like from Twilight.  

Invision Power Services: Making ACP warp speed look blindingly good. Or something.  
@Matt promised me that he had enough vegemite to feed the team to do a couple more updates in 4.5.      
Also, I recommend that you be promoted to our sound mixer for releases.  Your "BUM BUM BUM!!!" was on point.  Most people will be blind by then due to the ACP, but at least we can listen to you.

Congrats @Ehren H on the new theme for the ACP!  Can't wait until they let you loose on the front-end!  🙂  

Vampire
But the sparkly cool ones, like from Twilight.  

Invision Power Services: Making ACP warp speed look blindingly good. Or something.  
@Matt promised me that he had enough vegemite to feed the team to do a couple more updates in 4.5.      
Also, I recommend that you be promoted to our sound mixer for releases.  Your "BUM BUM BUM!!!" was on point.  Most people will be blind by then due to the ACP, but at least we can listen to you.

Vampire
But the sparkly cool ones, like from Twilight.  

Invision Power Services: Making ACP warp speed look blindingly good. Or something.  
@Matt promised me that he had enough vegemite to feed the team to do a couple more updates in 4.5.      
Also, I recommend that you be promoted to our sound mixer for releases.  Your "BUM BUM BUM!!!" was on point.  Most people will be blind by then due to the ACP, but at least we can listen to you.

Congrats @Ehren H on the new theme for the ACP!  Can't wait until they let you loose on the front-end!  🙂  

So this has nothing to do with the day my wife convinced me that we should get married? oh well. Still a good article I suppose 😊

This is definitely a much more accurate view and I agree with your sentiment.  (I also like your point about low value members with 0 posts, you should have another template specifically for those members versus a member with a lot of content.)  For the 10% where you'll never change their mind, that's fine - delete their account and move on.  But that leaves 90% (!) for you to engage with, including members who have never posted, who don't know why they're deleting their account, and who can be re-activated to become a member.  And for the 10% with valuable content who have been a member, putting in an extra 30 seconds and filling out a template to save a member is a great trade-off.  
This guide isn't about trying to win back 100% of all members. That's not realistic.  But if you can deflect half of the negative inquiries and activate 10% to revisit, that's 10% more than what you had before.  
My ultimate point is that some of us spend all of our time in the "community." And we forget about communication that occurs in the "non-community" through the Contact Form and Commerce Support Requests, and these are just as valuable touchpoints (if not more) than those in the community.  

It sounds very good in theory, but my real life experience is slightly different. From the deletion request I get:
- about 80% are of people that never posted and I have no idea why they want their profile deleted
- about 10% are fully convinced and there is nothing you can do to change their mind
- about 10% are salvageable. I put 100% of my efforts in these requests and sometimes I win. There is absolutely no way I will put the same amount of time and energy for the other 90%.

This is definitely a much more accurate view and I agree with your sentiment.  (I also like your point about low value members with 0 posts, you should have another template specifically for those members versus a member with a lot of content.)  For the 10% where you'll never change their mind, that's fine - delete their account and move on.  But that leaves 90% (!) for you to engage with, including members who have never posted, who don't know why they're deleting their account, and who can be re-activated to become a member.  And for the 10% with valuable content who have been a member, putting in an extra 30 seconds and filling out a template to save a member is a great trade-off.  
This guide isn't about trying to win back 100% of all members. That's not realistic.  But if you can deflect half of the negative inquiries and activate 10% to revisit, that's 10% more than what you had before.  
My ultimate point is that some of us spend all of our time in the "community." And we forget about communication that occurs in the "non-community" through the Contact Form and Commerce Support Requests, and these are just as valuable touchpoints (if not more) than those in the community.  

This is not necessarily true. (And using a different password everywhere could drive a person crazy in this day and age.) Changing your password more often - especially when forced -, leads to lazy, insecure passwords.
Microsoft actually talked about how it's a dated practice. Better security and things like 2FA go much farther, especially when you already are using a good password. Avoid using common passwords that are very easy to guess, which includes names and birthdates.

The forum where I and much of my core group were active had automatic registration enabled. The admin became an absentee, and the forum became overrun with spam. No one could reach the admin, and even when someone successfully did get through to him, nothing got resolved. He didn't want to do anything; he held onto the forum yet he wouldn't relinquish any control. Very strange. I think he was trying to run the community through the web-site/portal thingy with comments enabled there, and he just didn't care about the forums. The website/portal wasn't really conducive to interaction. The spam situation in the forums was horrific. Most of us migrated. Some stayed and kept trying with that admin. By the time he finally relinquished some moderation/admin control most had moved on to my current community. Only stragglers were left behind. Some of my current members would post in both places, I think just to support those few who had made a go of it there, but soon that fizzled out, too. I've maintained my community for longer than a decade. 

Thanks for this useful post @Joel R

Same. I've got 5 of them all with similar names and it was always a bit of a hassle/pain to figure out which was which.

Settings to turn on email logging for email statistics is located in the ACP:
ACP > System > Email Settings.  Enable Log Statistics

 
Settings to turn on email advertisements is located in the ACP:
ACP > System > Advertisements.  New tab for Email Advertisements.  

I do the same but I try to keep the same URL if possible. I limit words used on FURLS to 5 words max which allows me to make changes without changing the URL. But, there are times you just have to change the whole title.
Other things I do to improve SEO...
Merge similar topics (especially if old and not driving too much traffic; especially, those that have some value) Format content so that it's easier to scan.  Improve content that drives traffic. (Evergreen content) Delete/Archive old poor quality content.  Delete old accounts with 0 content. None of this is easy but it's worth it. I recommend starting with your most popular topics (high Views count).
I'm against auto-tagging. I just don't see any value to it.
My team have instructions to tag only "high-quality" content.
We use tagging for the Similar Content block because it gives us some control.
We have control over what keywords are used. We  have control over what topics are tagged.  We have control over what topics are found in Similar Content block (and tag pages). The easier it is to find these "quality pages" the more value they gain. (eg. More traffic, shares, word of mouth, etc)
BACKGROUND...
Years ago I used tagging like you do. Enabled auto-tagging, allowed all members to tag, etc ... we literally had hundreds of thousands of tags (perhaps over 1 million) - many were similar, typos, poor quality, etc. (VBULLETIN BIG BOARD SITE)
I found myself working constantly in cleaning the mess. The ROI just wasn't there when compared to other things I could be doing. So I dropped it altogether with no regrets.
TAKE CONTROL
I'm sure you have heard of User Generated Content (UGC). If you run a forum site you are dependent on your members to produce content. About a decade or so ago, most forum admins peaked in terms of traffic. Since then traffic likely plateaued or dropped (more likely the latter).
Heck, back then you would see many forums selling for over $1 million dollars. Not these days. 
The biggest problem we have with a UGC business model is that we have very little control over what members post.
Technology and Google are changing rapidly it's time to start taking some control back. The above is just one way of doing just that.
Joel R's Community Management tips is another great way to take back some control.  A good community manager redirects focus where it should go. 
So let's get back to these Growth Hacks. I'm sure @Joel R would appreciate it. 😉

I’d be interested to see how that looks, can you pm me your site info? 
I do use tags and also add tags into topics. One thing that has worked for me is editing topic titles to make them more relevant and have better page titles. It’s driven organic traffic on some topics that had titles not descriptive enough. I then use the similar topics plugin based off topic titles.

oh, yeah ... this is custom
under first post BUT only when a tag is present (tags are added by Staff or whatever group) 
JFYI: Automatic tagging or using tags made by members is NOT recommended.