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opentype

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  1. Agree
    opentype got a reaction from dhpunkt in Unite your community with the Events application   
    Are there settings regarding what is shown on the event front page? Because what I see so far seems to assume a lot of things. Like that there are local events and events worth searching for by location. 
    And most importantly, it assumes there are a lot of events. With my design communities, I always have the issue that there might just be a couple of conferences throughout the year, so the only layout that makes sense is a stream view of all upcoming events. Was that removed? Is that still possible? None of the monthly/weekly/daily options make sense for just a few events throughout the year. No one wants to click through empty weeks or months to see if something might appear later. 
  2. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Ocean West in Unite your community with the Events application   
    Are there settings regarding what is shown on the event front page? Because what I see so far seems to assume a lot of things. Like that there are local events and events worth searching for by location. 
    And most importantly, it assumes there are a lot of events. With my design communities, I always have the issue that there might just be a couple of conferences throughout the year, so the only layout that makes sense is a stream view of all upcoming events. Was that removed? Is that still possible? None of the monthly/weekly/daily options make sense for just a few events throughout the year. No one wants to click through empty weeks or months to see if something might appear later. 
  3. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Randy Calvert in Unite your community with the Events application   
    Are there settings regarding what is shown on the event front page? Because what I see so far seems to assume a lot of things. Like that there are local events and events worth searching for by location. 
    And most importantly, it assumes there are a lot of events. With my design communities, I always have the issue that there might just be a couple of conferences throughout the year, so the only layout that makes sense is a stream view of all upcoming events. Was that removed? Is that still possible? None of the monthly/weekly/daily options make sense for just a few events throughout the year. No one wants to click through empty weeks or months to see if something might appear later. 
  4. Like
    opentype reacted to AlexWebsites in New Live Community Features!   
    I have to agree with this. Just too expensive with no discounts for multiple cloud licenses. As a self hosted user with 8 licenses, I have not added a new IPS license in a while because of this direction or lack of any major price changes, only increases. It’s much more beneficial for me to run my own server for all my licenses. They all share resources on my platform. Doing the math, if self hosted goes away, I’ll be forced to leave and switch platforms. No question about it.
  5. Like
    opentype reacted to Hisashi in New tool for community managers: Rank Progression   
    Articles already receive a record in database of how many views they received.
    I would like to look at the data based on periods, daily, weekly, monthly. To understand what my users are viewing, or a list of 'top views' (articles).
    These are highly relevant data.
  6. Like
    opentype reacted to AlexWebsites in Spark more real time engagement with the Trending Content feature   
    I hope you’re getting an IPS employee discount…😉 these plans are just not financially comparable to self hosting, especially for multi-site owners such as myself. No matter how much math I do, it’s not even close for me.
  7. Like
    opentype reacted to ufshane in Spark more real time engagement with the Trending Content feature   
    Yes we will be preparing for the inevitability of this in the future sadly. I have been a big fan on Invision dating back our our DJ community forums, when we took over our current community it was VB and we switched to IPB not long after. 
    The amount we are going to have to invest in development still does not offset the monthly cost for us to have the features we would want. Our community is only about 14k members.
    We have a dedicated server that we use for more than just our community, so paying for another hosted service just does not make sense. Especially since we have full control of our environment.
  8. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Claudia999 in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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?
  9. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Sonya* in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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?
  10. Like
    opentype reacted to Rikki in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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.
  11. Thanks
    opentype reacted to Dll in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    The truth is that despite the rose tinted specs maybe being worn by @Davyc, starting a forum in the years before social media wasn't a guarantee of success by any stretch. In fact, most failed, as they do now. 
    As has already been mentioned by others, getting success with a community (and other web related stuff) requires a number of things to come together, luck included. In some respects, social media can help with starting a website or community etc, because it's an instant way to drive interest, whereas pre social-media you'd have to wait for google to find you or rely on less straight forward methods of getting the word out there.
    That's not to say social media hasn't taken some traffic and opportunities away from communities, of course it has, and it's probably changed the type of communities which can and can't work. But, with the right idea, niche, and the right person or people driving it, along with that splice of luck, there's still loads of opportunity to create a thriving community. 
  12. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Lunars in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    Okay, I am out. That’s just so dishonest. No one is saying that everything is “wonderful” and that a new community will certainly be thriving in 2 years time. It’s just a straw-man argument, which disrespects us and renders every minute people have invested here trying to make valid and useful points useless. You turn our arguments into a joke by exaggerating them to ridiculous proportions. 
    The people who run successful communities are certainly not the ones in denial about running successful communities. That doesn’t work, by definition. It would be much more useful to take in our advice instead of trying to argue against it and trying to explain it away with denying numbers, calling everything an exception that doesn’t fit your narrative and so on. 
  13. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Ibai in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    There is an underlying, more important question regarding the question whether social media promotion works: 
    Does guest traffic create conversions (i.e. registrations and active members) on the specific website? If yes, then creating more traffic (e.g. through social media posts) creates more conversions. If the answer is “no”, then all attempts to create more traffic are pointless. Wether it’s paid ads, social media posts, newsletters or whatever. The website must first deliver something that users would want to or even need to sign up for. 
  14. Like
    opentype reacted to Sonya* in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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 😄 
  15. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Dll in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    That difference between business and hobby is a red herring. It’s relevant in regards to financing a community website, but hardly in terms of starting one. If I start a community as business venture, I still have zero members just as a hobby site. 
    I also think that the search volume matters, because it is still a big opportunity to get traffic to communities. When I search on Google, I am not ending up in Facebook or What’sApp groups or on Discord. Traditional communities can still work well here. 
    Apart from that, this is only going in circles. Yes, those tips are about nurturing an existing community. That’s why the title is How to inspire your community's members to engage. Everything else is something else. Coming up with a concept for a community that users will want to sign up for won’t be in an article. That’s something the owner of each community needs to find and try out. It’s easy to blame social media when it doesn’t work out, but the growth of IPS with 27,000 current IPS clients who pay their renewals every 6 months currently doesn’t give the appearance that social media is taking over. 
  16. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Jim M in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    There is an underlying, more important question regarding the question whether social media promotion works: 
    Does guest traffic create conversions (i.e. registrations and active members) on the specific website? If yes, then creating more traffic (e.g. through social media posts) creates more conversions. If the answer is “no”, then all attempts to create more traffic are pointless. Wether it’s paid ads, social media posts, newsletters or whatever. The website must first deliver something that users would want to or even need to sign up for. 
  17. Thanks
    opentype got a reaction from Ramsesx in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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. 😉 
  18. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Daniel F in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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. 😉 
  19. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Kjell Iver Johansen in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    There is an underlying, more important question regarding the question whether social media promotion works: 
    Does guest traffic create conversions (i.e. registrations and active members) on the specific website? If yes, then creating more traffic (e.g. through social media posts) creates more conversions. If the answer is “no”, then all attempts to create more traffic are pointless. Wether it’s paid ads, social media posts, newsletters or whatever. The website must first deliver something that users would want to or even need to sign up for. 
  20. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Sonya* in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    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. 😉 
  21. Like
    opentype got a reaction from Ramsesx in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    No no no! Looking at at the successes doesn’t teach you how to do it. This is a common misconception with an entire industry of “coaches” build around it. 
    If you have some time, watch what this video teaches about the “survivorship bias”. 
     
  22. Agree
    opentype got a reaction from Davyc in How to inspire your community's members to engage   
    There is an underlying, more important question regarding the question whether social media promotion works: 
    Does guest traffic create conversions (i.e. registrations and active members) on the specific website? If yes, then creating more traffic (e.g. through social media posts) creates more conversions. If the answer is “no”, then all attempts to create more traffic are pointless. Wether it’s paid ads, social media posts, newsletters or whatever. The website must first deliver something that users would want to or even need to sign up for. 
  23. Like
    opentype got a reaction from sobrenome in SEO: Improving crawling efficiency   
    I would say this is “working as intended”. By changing the default app, you moved the app URLs to the installation’s root folder. So Yandex treating it as duplicate is actually the expected result. 
    It makes little sense trying to divert the traffic back to the /store/ directory. If you want that, then why change the default app to begin with?
    Changing the URL structure of the site can disrupt traffic from search engines. It’s unfortunate, but unavoidable. I wouldn’t touch the default app for established sites unless I absolutely have to. 
  24. Agree
    opentype got a reaction from Ramsesx in Achievements just became even more powerful   
    As far as I can see, only product categories can be selected, not individual products, correct?
    Also, It doesn’t seem to honour product subscription renewals, which is a huge bummer for me. I want to give members a badge if they buy any of my “support products” (product subscriptions or one-time donation products with fixed prices), but it looks like the Commerce badge is only given for new purchases, so members who support me for years by renewing their product every year will never get the badge. 
    What I would expect is that all payments in the category are considered and the badge is given once. (To be clear: only once. A renewal shouldn’t give another badge or multiple products in the same category shouldn‘t create multiple badges. But adding that rule now should consider running product subscriptions either instantly or at least when the next renewal is paid.)
  25. Agree
    opentype got a reaction from Ramsesx in Achievements just became even more powerful   
    Are there settings for that? Is it on by default? 
    I would rather not send out those emails. 
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