At AVForums we have a thriving Members' Home Cinema Gallery forum. (It's called Home Theater in America).
For years, our members have used threads to create their home cinema galleries with photos attached or embedded. Often they are like diaries of the build. As the build develops, they reply with the latest updates and photos. Other members reply with advice and encouragement.
You can see the forum here: http://www.avforums.com/forums/members-home-cinema-gallery.152/
So I implemented the Showcase addon with a home cinema category in the hope that people would use it instead of having threads in the home cinema gallery forum. But nobody has used it. Actually 3 people have and one of those I prompted.
The problem for me is that I haven't integrated the showcase into the forum. I don't use the sidebar module because it's too resource hungry (as I recall, the images were not being resized to thumbnails and so were bigger than necessary, and several more we're loaded than were immediately visible. I may be wrong, here, but that's what I recall about it.)
While the Showcase link is in our community menu, there is nothing which really prompts the members to use it.
What I think is needed is to maybe integrate the showcase into every thread in that forum by default. So that everyone in there sees the showcase tabs on their threads. If a tab is empty, it's displayed anyway, with default text saying that the member hasn't entered their information, yet. That would surely prompt them to start taking advantage of it.
This would mean creating a Showcase for existing threads. Maybe the next time a member visits their thread, they get a prompt to invite them to convert it to a showcase.
They do this by selecting which images are moved to the image gallery tab and which videos are moved to the video tab. There would need to be options to move the contents of selected posts to particular tabs so that the process is really easy.
When starting a new thread in that forum, the Create Thread button needs custom text. I would change it to Create Showcase to familiarise people with the term 'Showcase' and emphasise that it's more than a thread. And, of course, a new Showcase would be created by default.
All this effort has gone into the Showcase addon. For it to be adopted by the community, I think we need to put its advantages right there in front of them as part of their habitual use of the forum rather than making it a separate section that they have to make an effort to visit.
For years, our members have used threads to create their home cinema galleries with photos attached or embedded. Often they are like diaries of the build. As the build develops, they reply with the latest updates and photos. Other members reply with advice and encouragement.
You can see the forum here: http://www.avforums.com/forums/members-home-cinema-gallery.152/
So I implemented the Showcase addon with a home cinema category in the hope that people would use it instead of having threads in the home cinema gallery forum. But nobody has used it. Actually 3 people have and one of those I prompted.
The problem for me is that I haven't integrated the showcase into the forum. I don't use the sidebar module because it's too resource hungry (as I recall, the images were not being resized to thumbnails and so were bigger than necessary, and several more we're loaded than were immediately visible. I may be wrong, here, but that's what I recall about it.)
While the Showcase link is in our community menu, there is nothing which really prompts the members to use it.
What I think is needed is to maybe integrate the showcase into every thread in that forum by default. So that everyone in there sees the showcase tabs on their threads. If a tab is empty, it's displayed anyway, with default text saying that the member hasn't entered their information, yet. That would surely prompt them to start taking advantage of it.
This would mean creating a Showcase for existing threads. Maybe the next time a member visits their thread, they get a prompt to invite them to convert it to a showcase.
They do this by selecting which images are moved to the image gallery tab and which videos are moved to the video tab. There would need to be options to move the contents of selected posts to particular tabs so that the process is really easy.
When starting a new thread in that forum, the Create Thread button needs custom text. I would change it to Create Showcase to familiarise people with the term 'Showcase' and emphasise that it's more than a thread. And, of course, a new Showcase would be created by default.
All this effort has gone into the Showcase addon. For it to be adopted by the community, I think we need to put its advantages right there in front of them as part of their habitual use of the forum rather than making it a separate section that they have to make an effort to visit.
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