One Step Away From A Revolution In Forums...

[fixer]

sbjsbj

i agree with most all you said, but i do think our gasp of air lies within the gray area of facebook

we cannot stand toe to toe with them and cannot beat them at their own game

your approach is exactly how we should be thinking! and i think when it comes to networking we are underestimating the power of assigning locale

militia is not gun range people, militias are groups of people who are the last line of defense shall our military fail or become infiltrated or our own government turns against its citizens , we maintain sanctuaries and prepare for if/when things go bad

 

[sbjsbj]

Well, in your case networking and social experience is very important of course. But as I said, it only applies to those kind of forums. And it could be of course very important feature of your site.

You could have a detailed membermap like which people cover which area of the country, So one could look at the map, and see which locations/areas are covered by your militias. And if in one area there would be more people, the covered area would be a darker color or sth. to signal that in that area the coverage is strong. There is so many things you could do with the membermap. But sadly, all of this will need custom development. No forum software will focus on that.

I was not saying that militias are gun range people. But I figured they might be interested in guns (as how would they be the last line of defense without guns?). So, I figured for your niche, you should have that kind of information/directory saved. Because I would say that there is correlation between those people.
People who are militias will likely be interested in guns.
People who are interested in guns, will likely be patriotic and could get interested in joining in militias.
So, having expertise information about guns (like for each model, oldtimer models, a wiki) and also a directory for gun ranges etc. will increase your forum's value. As you could widen your target audience and will also land more hits on Google.

Of course militias will have a smartphone probably. So that is also one thing what they will have common (and your future visitors). But it makes not much sense to serve expertise information about phones. I guess not many of your audience will be there because of that and will be able to offer expertise in that matter. Better leave that to phone/technology forums which are suited better for that.

However guns seem to be a close interest what your users might have. Not saying you should turn your forum into a gun forum, but as your forum is more a "social" forum and it is hard to capture "social" as Google hits, you need hard content. Hard as in which can be served to Google. A membermap, no matter how good, will not lure many visitors, so you need hard content. When people look for guns, your forum should come up.

(PS: I just use "guns" as an example. I have no idea what common shared interests your audience would have. You know it better than us. So feel free to replace "guns" with anything else. Whatever suits better.)

 

[fixer]

The hard content is politics, survival , prepping and tactics

Putting focus on guns hurts the site as them topics are quick to get black listed, Facebook won’t even allow us to link to a thread talking about a good sale on a gun

 

[sbjsbj]

Gotcha, I thought in the land of the 2nd Amendment, it wouldn't be such a problem to have content about guns.
But I am mistaken as it seems. I mean you guys love your guns and since the big companies such as Google, Facebook etc. all are also American, I would have guessed you guys have it easier to promote stuff about guns than in Europe.

Then it explains why you are looking for social experience features such as an advanced membermap. You are trying to come up with stuff to enhance the quality of your forum.

I am not sure how much hard content you can get for "survival, prepping and tactics" without being able to focus on guns aswell.
And politics is just too broad and you have millions of other competitors, which mainly are newspapers. Very hard to build hard content around that but your target audience is basically the whole population of USA.

Difficult situation. It makes sense why you want to compete with Facebook then, as you have it hard to find hard content which makes you push in the direction of social experience.

 

[fixer]

Our nation is divided 1/2 of us are gun lovers the other half are traitors

so we focus not just on firearms but competencies as well...

 

[fixer]

Our site has been going crazy with traffic from Hong Kong as they are revolting against their government. The citizens are downloading guerrilla tactic information like its going out of style , over 300 downloads today

 

[DanielF]

I have coded something similar for a community ( a lot of localisation stuff with a location field, but also with the live geolocation from the smartphone, members near me, locations aka IPS venues near me, this weekends events near me, clubs, etc..) but people complained a lot about privacy and 90% of the people stopped using it after a while

 

[fixer]

I have coded something similar for a community ( a lot of localisation stuff with a location field, but also with the live geolocation from the smartphone, members near me, locations aka IPS venues near me, this weekends events near me, clubs, etc..) but people complained a lot about privacy and 90% of the people stopped using it after a while

that sounds amazing! do you have any of the addons laying around?

 

[DanielF]

that sounds amazing! do you have any of the addons laying around?

Sorry, all my custom client projects are exclusive. I just wanted to share some ideas (that there are many possibilities and that it can be utilised in the whole IPS suite and not only for "members near me" ) and also at the same time show that some of the concerns which were mentioned here are real and that it's an interesting idea, but that it won't work in the real world for a lot of communities.

 

[fixer]

all new profile pages that will include a “members near me” block and a “clubs near me” block

love it

 

[DanielF]

all new profile pages that will include a “members near me” block and a “clubs near me” block

love it

You mean "Members near this Member"

Are you checking your profile frequently? Have you any stats about your members and how often they visit their profile?
IMO a profile is like a business card. Others visit it, but I never visit my own profile. Why would I? I'm aware of all the data there, there's no need for me to visit it, except for status update replies(which I personally don't use at all..)

Members near me would need to be a block on the landing page, in my account settings page, or a central member list/member directory or on any other central page, but not on my own profile.

 

[DanielF]

Are you checking your profile frequently? Have you any stats about your members and how often they visit their profile?

Sorry if this sounds probably aggressive(English isn't my first language ), I'm really interested into other peoples opinion and experiance about their profile and how often they visit it.

 

[fixer]

Invision Profiles are stuck in the middle when you think of what a profile is

on one hand is “my space” with cover art, things like, grainy mp3 background music and a mouse pointer with a tail

on another is facebook where your profile is the beginning and ending of your experience ... you post what you are doing and what you think (status)

Maybe Invision should shift to a networking profile more like “linkedin” where it displays member location, products, services, community reputation, education, trades and skillset

I don’t know the answer for profiles all i know is xf, vb and invision all have horrible mostly useless profiles but adding location options would not make any of them worst

 

[DanielF]

Invision Profiles are stuck in the middle when you think of what a profile is

on one hand is “my space” with cover art, things like, grainy mp3 background music and a mouse pointer with a tail

on another is facebook where your profile is the beginning and ending of your experience ... you post what you are doing and what you think (status)

Maybe Invision should shift to a networking profile more like “linkedin” where it displays member location, products, services, community reputation, education, trades and skillset

I don’t know the answer for profiles all i know is xf, vb and invision all have horrible mostly useless profiles but adding location options would not make any of them worst

Well, to be fair, it's the same there. Facebooks feed AKA my landing page isn't the same as my FB profile, I also never visit my profile there except when I change some details to verify that everything is correct or when I search for some random FB friends which I recognise by their avatar.

But I think I get what you mean. On the old vB3 / ipb3 days, when portals where popular, people used to get a lot more personalised information there, which was in fact the landing page (at least from my own experiance a lot of people had a guest landing page with all the recent content and some important things.. and they had another layout for logged in members.. some scripts allowed members to customise their landing page at all, they could place whatever blocks/widgets they want to their own landing page which was amazing).. and now such page is missing on most communities..

IMO this was fine at this time, but things change, priorities change, stuff which people are interested to see, change.
Almost all sites have now a notifications system in the global navigation bar, which serves all the "important updates", but yea, we're getting off topic here

 

[fixer]

Starting to gain a new perspective that forums are for topic discussion

communities include networking tools, knowledge databases and deliver a service

mymilitia.com is the definitive resource for militia, we do not just discuss militia related topics like a militia forum would

with a community we need effective profiles for forums they do not matter

 

[whitetigergrowl]

This is something I've been talking about recently on Invisions company forum. Profiles are stuck in the early 2000s and really haven't evolved much. Their purpose is rather static and honestly the majority of people pay no attention to them.

Even if you pimp out the profile, most still have no incentive to visit it. So most people never even see what you have. And the tabbing system in profiles is outdated for it as well. Honestly I don't think most people even check out any of the tabs. They are just there hiding info. There is also no incentive for anyone to do anything with their profile.

I think the profile should be more integrated with the actual forum activity and not feel like a separate thing from it. People should be able to be more readily interactive with it and not feel like it's just a separate pointless thing.

 

[Alpha1]

https://www.mymilitia.com/forums/topic/62822-near-me-connect-with-members-close-to-you/
lol. The member closest to Fixer is... Fixer. Meh.

 

[fixer]

https://www.mymilitia.com/forums/topic/62822-near-me-connect-with-members-close-to-you/
lol. The member closest to Fixer is... Fixer. Meh.

oh course it is 0 miles

 

[sanction9]

Our nation is divided 1/2 of us are gun lovers the other half are traitors

Riiight, there's nothing in between those two extremes....

 

[davert]

Not to get back to the topic or anything, but SMF has long has a plugin that doesn't rely on Facebook for this, called Member Map. It does rely on Google Maps, so I guess six of one...?

It was created in 2007 but last update was 2014 so might be dead now.