So you've got people to register on your forum and they've made their initial contribution, but once they've done that, how do you keep those members engaged and coming back to your forum? It's an age-old problem. A user registers, they may participate for a while if you're lucky, and then it's really a toss-up as to whether they will stay and become a semi-permanent fixture of your forum, or you never see them again.
Of all the challenges facing forum owners, this one requires the most creative approaches. There are various existing features that are geared towards keeping your members engaged. They can receive alerts, push notifications or emails when content is posted in threads or forums they watch, or you can manually email...
Have you seen...?
This forum spotlights some of XenForo's interesting features. Spotlights on features in upcoming releases will be posted here.
Mobile first. We hear it again and again, and with over half of all web traffic coming from mobile devices, it's more important than ever to provide your mobile visitors with a great experience.
Of course, XenForo 2 is built on a fully responsive design that gracefully adapts to any display size and makes using XenForo a pleasure on all devices, but now we're taking it a step further by enabling any XenForo site to become a progressive web app.
Progressive web what?
Okay, let's back up a little. Imagine a technology that allows a web site to appear and behave like an app without having to produce native code for each platform, or go through any vendor's App Store equivalent.
Progressive web apps, or PWAs, aim to bridge the gap between...
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Participation. It's the life blood of a forum, and once you have a group of dedicated members creating and discussing content, your forum will flourish.
But there's a barrier to entry when it comes to participation. When a new visitor stumbles upon your forum from a search engine, they may read the content that piqued their interest and then feel inclined to add their own thought-provoking response, but at that point they are confronted with the dreaded
... at which point, in many cases, the whim disappears and they disappear like a stranger in the night.
The prospect of having to complete a form and go through the rigmarole of signing-up to a new service is quite a turn-off to new visitors, for obvious reasons. Visitors have a...
A new way to surface content
Forums are usually devoted to a single subject matter and the threads they contain relate to that subject matter, unless it's all gone wrong and your users are wandering off topic. Threads belong to their parent forums, so if your board separates posts about kittens from posts about puppies into separate forums, you are never going to see a kitten thread and a puppy thread sitting next to each other within your forum hierarchy. This is how it has always been, it's the basic nature of the discussion forum paradigm.
But what if you want to have a forum that contains all threads from across your entire board that were posted in the week before last, or all threads started by moderators, or all threads that...
Welcome to the first of our "Have you seen...?" (HYS) series for XenForo 2.2! To ensure you're kept up to date with future threads, we strongly recommend clicking the "Watch forum" link here and enabling email notifications if you haven't done so already 🙂
Over the course of the next few weeks we would like to not only introduce you to the new features we've been working hard on for the next version of XenForo, but also introduce you to some new members of the XenForo team! We'll introduce those new team members in the upcoming HYS threads.
But first...
New minimum requirements
You might remember that we started requiring PHP 5.6 starting with the release of XenForo 2.1. We base decisions like this on the "anonymous usage statistics"...
