Online Community Question

[English_Desi]

Hi All,

I am looking into the viability of building an online community for customers at my company and would be grateful for some advice.

The premise is that we have an online information product and are looking to evolve the online information to a community based platform where users can get together and ask questions of their peers and embark on discussion of the key issues associated with their area.

I have some questions:

Before the company invests in this across all our product areas, we are looking to pilot this for say a period of three months and use XenForo as our chosen platform.

1. In any potential forum, we would like to see the following attributes:

- Ability to moderate posts
- Gamification Engine whereby other users can reward good posts thus encouraging respondents
- Ability to create sub-communities and search
- Agreement to T's and C's prior to posting

Does the Xenforo come with this as standard ? if not what are basics and what do I need to buy ?

2. What other add-ons do people recommend I purchase as part of our implementation ?

3. How customisale is the XenForo platform in terms of look and feel ?

4. I am going to hire a developer to project manage this and build it on our behalf, any suggestions on where to start ?

Look forward to youe valued feedback

 

[Paul B]

Posts can be moderated - on a per forum, user group or user basis.

There is no reward system built in, other than the ability for other members to like posts, with the ability to promote to user groups based on the number of total likes received.

I'm not sure what you mean by sub-communities. If you mean on different domains, that wouldn't be possible out of the box and would require custom development.

Agreement to T&C's is essentially done at registration when the checkbox is ticked.

XF is totally customisable - there are many third party styles and add-on available in the resources which should give you some idea - Resources

There are many custom developers who already produce add-ons and custom work - you can see some of them listed here - https://xenforo.com/community/forums/third-party-services-offers.42/

 

[English_Desi]

Thanks - on the platform are we able to make areas accessible to subscribers/non subscribers e.g. let certain threads be accessed by those we have allowed to do so.

Does the platform also allow us to see who is online at the moment

 

[Paul B]

Permissions can apply down to the forum level, bit not individual thread level.
So you can make specific forums accessible to guests or logged in members, members who have purchased upgrades, etc.

Yes, you can see who is online here: https://xenforo.com/community/online/

 

[English_Desi]

is there a limit to the number of people using the forum ? I mean does the cost of the license increase with number of forum participants ?

 

[Zynektic]

There is no limit but obviously your host needs to be able to handle it without issues. A few users here have hosting companies for XenForo specifically and people like @MattW provides services for configuring it and monthly checks and such, as well as his own hosting or configuring it somewhere like Linode.

Also in reply to your sub-communities. If you mean within the forum, there are a few plugins which allow 'social groups' that can be hidden or public and a forum users can create a group and configure it to request approval and such to join if you wanted something like that.

 

[Paul B]

does the cost of the license increase with number of forum participants

No, there is a single price for the license, regardless of how many visitors or members the site has.