MyBB Community Forums

http://www.feverbee.com/

Co-worker of mine introduced me to this site this morning. Some of the stuff here is really brilliant -- and, thankfully, resonates with what I've been doing on my own site.

Some choice advice that a lot of community managers I see would do well to read:

Quote:The common mistake is to only identify the interest. e.g. 'If members are interested in roasting their own coffee, let's make the community about coffee roasting. We will tell members to join if they want to learn about coffee roasting.'
This leads to content-driven strategies. These don't work well for communities. This appeals to the broadest possible audience. It get lots of people to sign up. However, it puts people in a passive (lurker) mindset. You don't have to participate to get the benefit, so why participate? At the moment, most communities are designed for lurkers.

Quote:Refine the most used features. Don't spent too much timedeveloping features members wont use. Refine the most used features. Small refinements on discussion boards, notifications, layout/design, and profiles yield better results than adding new features.
Look for things to remove, not things to add. It's usually better to remove things (text, elements that aren't used, pages with low traffic). If you begin with the goal of figuring what to add, you'll never optimize the site (and waste a lot of time/money). Keep a high social density.

In particular, this article is required reading.

Check it out.

Completely agree on both points he's made there. It seems like a cool site, but it's not something I'm interested particularly in reading.

You should at least read the single article I linked, it's awesome.

I did. I browsed through the site after too. It's just not something that appeals to me directly but it is an awesome site.

Thanks a lot for sharing this Brad. Community management is one of my particular weakest points easily. I'll be trying to read up on some of the stuff mentioned.

>gives out advice to make sites better
>has a crappy looking website

Sounds legit.

I think calling his site crappy looking is a bit of a stretch. It's pretty bland but it's not offensive. And very little of his advice has anything to do with aesthetics of design. To write off some pretty awesome advice because you don't like his site's design is bad reasoning.

The content is clearly very good and I am bookmarking it for future reference but I still think it's ironic to give out advice on making better websites when you haven't even properly thought about yours. I mean, is it really that hard to replace TypePad's default favicon?

haha, i agree about the favicon, i always lost the tab because the favicon had nothing to do with the site. but his passion is clearly in communities, and his blog is not one.