It’s great having a community forum for Fluent, and Epic Bits — thank you! A couple of suggestions, based on my personal experience with similar communities in the past:
ADD MORE CATEGORIES: it might be helpful to have more post categories besides ‘General’ and ‘Fluent Support’. Typical categories include ‘Announcements’ (for announcing releases and other official product/company notifications), ‘Feature Requests’ (for users to suggest and discuss new features), ‘Tips & Tricks’ (for advanced and niche usage applications), and ‘Meta’ (for posts such as this, allowing users to make suggestions and discuss the functionality of the forum itself).
REDUCE POST LIMIT TIME FOR NEW USERS: right now, new forum users are required to wait 24 hours if they want to post more than 3 posts. While this stops spamming, it also motivates new users to create posts that include multiple questions and suggestions, rather than splitting them into individual ones. A compromise would be to reduce the wait time from 24 to a smaller waiting period, such as perhaps 2 hours.
INITIALLY, FRQUENT ENGAGEMENT FROM CREATORS: until the community increases in size and gains traction with members helping each other and answering each other’s questions, it is crucial for creators to participate. If a community is left unattended, and new members go longer than 48 hours without any answer or activity on their posts, they may perceive the community as 'unfriendly, ‘unengaged’ or ‘dead’…
I hope these suggestions help! Once again, thank you for creating the forum, and for creating Fluent!
I have to be honest: Forum is planned to be taken down. All the buzz happens on Discord currently, and it was always like that. Also many customers prefer reaching out via Email directly. Forum received literally zero attention on a span of its lifetime. I believe the reason for this is just how this format is not in demand anymore, at least for Fluent.
I appreciate your input again and invite you to our Discord, if you’re not yet there – Fluent AI
Thank you for the explanation, @importnil — I’ve gone ahead and joined your Discord server as well as the subreddit.
I have to admit, however, I do believe there is still a place for forums like this. Like most people, I do appreciate the value in seeing quick, chat-like responses posted in real-time, and Discord is great for that. But I participate in a couple of Discord-based software communities where I see a lot of knowledge and time being wasted: the same questions being asked over and over again, and the same requests, suggestions and issues being brought up again and again — because Discord is not meant as a permanent knowledge base, and searching past posts can be frustrating. The larger and older the community gets, the worse the experience… Forums do work as ‘community knowledge repository’ a lot better…
