Growing your CommunityServer (CS) Community is one of the most difficult and mysterious factors in site development. New communities might have scores of viewers but precious few members and worse, a handful of active posters.

One strategy is to permit anonymous posting whereby any passing reader can contribute content. While that comment might be moderated – meaning you can remove inappropriate content before its live – you haven’t really forged a relationship with the poster. They may or may not return.

If you can encourage membership by restricting some content to members only, or obviously require membership before a user can reply, you’re creating more reasons to convert the anonymous lurker into a real member. The key interaction point is when you have an actual forum sign-up. This is your first chance to make a real impact.

Trust

At this instant (you and) your site have been trusted with an email address and probably other membership data which is confidential. You must treat all member information as privileged information, both protecting the data-integrity of your membership database and undertaking not to sell-on or abuse that data. But you knew that already, right?

Welcome! Your Account is Enabled!

(When) Using email signup your CommunityServer membership system, CS will send out an email notification. The new member has to read this to get their new account password. So you’re now going to customize this message to personalize that welcome and to advertise specific content on your site. Immediately you’ve been able to advertise key parts of your site which might be “How to Use the Site” or material for “Newbies to the Community”.

Personalize your message. Your friends don’t call you “Site Admin”; your parents thought long-and-hard about your forename, use it! OK, even if you must adopt a persona or alias, at least try and look (via Avatar) and sound human. We sign our CS welcome messages with a couple of (real) names.

It works! We now regularly get replies appreciating the welcome message. You have then earned the permission to reply to start a conversation. Got it?

You have … friends!

You can configure CS to automatically add a number of New User Friends.

Admin > Member Administration > Configuration > Account Settings > New User Experience

When your new member signs-in they can see some new faces on their friends page. This can be a key support for the new user. It allows them to check forum etiquette, what’s permitted, a technical “How-To”, without experimenting in public.

Welcome Message

You can also configure a quick welcome Conversation Message which is advertised upon their sign-in area, and can be customized to your requirements. This message is customised upon the Admin screen above for New User Friends.

Bug Alert! We’ve experienced some problems when extending this message. With a few lines added to the message, fine, membership, friend and conversation message are all completed. Where we’ve added 3/4 lines + hyperlinks, member sign-up fails.

Nick Harrington
team Ambay Software

Growth Growth